


all the universe conspires

by goodmorningbeloved



Category: Uncharted (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Fusion, Angst, Bad Ethics, M/M, Memory Loss, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-25
Updated: 2017-02-25
Packaged: 2018-09-26 18:39:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9915818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodmorningbeloved/pseuds/goodmorningbeloved
Summary: The words were printed over goldenrod paper, blunt and without decoration:Rafe Adlerhas erasedSamuel Drakefrom their memory. Please refrain from mentioning their relationship again.





	

**Author's Note:**

> 1) this is heavily based off of the 2004 film "eternal sunshine of the spotless mind" and will contain spoilers for it. i highly recommend you watch it. it's a movie that sticks with you for a long time.
> 
> 2) i'm no expert on the technology that this fic describes, as a disclaimer. i did my best with what the movie provides and took creative license in a few other parts.
> 
> 3) thank you, thank you, thank you to [lily](http://lvnatone.tumblr.com), who put up with much of my shouting and 4am ramblings and who rewatched the movie with me, like, three times to help me sort out this au; [jill](http://jilldrawblog.tumblr.com), who drew a slew of [amazing pieces](https://jilldrawblog.tumblr.com/post/157697205368/ughrafe-posted-her-amazing-samrafe-eternal) for this au, go go go check them out (they're spoiler free!); and [erica](http://thirtysixsavefiles.tumblr.com), [kennedy](http://churro-chie.tumblr.com), and [maddie](http://videogamesandbutts.tumblr.com) for supporting me all throughout this fic, for putting up with me periodically dumping angst on them, for being amazing friends in general. seriously guys, thank you so much for believing in me???
> 
> 4) i edited this until my eyes burned, but i own up to any & all typos and inaccuracies i might have missed. sorry, i promise i tried my best. :<
> 
> 5) i'll probably post a more comprehensive list of references and detail notes on tumblr over the next few days, but until then! i hope you enjoy this as much as i enjoyed writing it. :>

** —MARCH FOURTEENTH. **

Outside, the world has been swallowed by white.

So maybe that’s an exaggeration. He can see well enough to walk across the street and into the park without hurting himself, but at the rate that snow is falling, it might as well be true. _Have Marches always been this cold?_ he wonders, which is followed by a thought of, _Have I always been crazy enough to walk around during a snowstorm?_ There are a few cars on the road so he's not completely alone, but those cars must be fighting to get back home, not idling around for the hell of it. 

Sam doesn’t know what he’s expecting to see in the park — he never knows what possesses him to sacrifice every morning he could spend inside the apartment, warm and comfortable, in order to walk around aimlessly, but this has become a sort of ritual for the past few weeks. Rain or shine (snow or shine?), he walks, sometimes around the park as a whole but more often around the ice rink in the middle, as if there is something significant here and he is stuck in its gravitational pull, doomed to orbit for the rest of his life. ( Sometimes he thinks he's just lonely. Living alone, the apartment _can_ get eerily quiet.)

Today, he isn't the only one at the park. 

He frowns behind his scarf at the sight of somebody else standing by the rink, bundled in just as many layers as he is, if not more.  It feels like a trespassing, like no one else should have any reason to be out in this snowstorm except for him, which of course is ridiculous but doesn't stop him from feeling wronged.

He decides to walk in the opposite direction, intent on ignoring the stranger completely, but it seems he forgot that walking in a circle means that he comes back around and has to walk by them eventually.

The stranger doesn't say anything, though. If they even notice he's there, they make no effort to reach out, standing silently in front of the golden plaque on the side of the rink. Sam wonders how many times they can possibly read it before they freeze to death.  He doesn’t ask. 

Round and round he goes, then, and it’s on the third time that he finally decides to veer from his path and come to stand next to the stranger.  “Shouldn’t you be inside?” he asks when he’s close enough, and even then he has to shout to be heard over the whipping wind.

A pair of eyes turn to him. He can’t quite tell their color through all the snow. “Shouldn’t you?” they shout back.

“I live there.” He points to the high-rise behind them. “This is just part of my morning walk.”  _You shouldn't be here_ , he really wants to say, but it would be rude now that he's made small talk and discovered that this person doesn't look like they know what they're doing either.

“Wanna invite me in?”

“What?” He leans in, struggling to hear.

“I said, do you want to invite me in?”

He’s not sure what makes him say yes ( _am I really that lonely?_ ), but ten minutes later they’re both stamping snow from their boots in the lobby of his building. “Always so busy, in and out, Mr. Drake,” comments the security guard. She's an older lady who always sounds disapproving whenever she deigns to speak to him. “Will you finally clear out your mailbox today?”

“Maybe tomorrow, ma’am,” is his standard response. He’s been saying that for about a month or however long it’s been since his mailbox key went missing, but all he gets are useless fliers anyway, and it’s not like bills and other _important_ things don’t already come with digital copies.

“Tomorrow,” the guard mutters mockingly. To Sam’s surprise, she tips her head towards his guest with much more friendliness and greets, “Mr. Adler.”

“You know my security guard?” Sam asks when they’re in the elevator. Inwardly, he combs his mind for any reason why his security guard would be more amiable to someone who doesn't even live in the building. Maybe she just dislikes  _him_ that much.

“My family knows a lot of people. She’s probably seen me in the papers before.” Adler sighs, tugs down his hood, and pulls off a red beanie to reveal dark hair smoothed back neatly. It's a marvel it wasn't ruined.

“Papers?” Sam raises an eyebrow. Who exactly did he invite inside? “Should I be worried about tabloids coming up with rumors of us having a,” he searches for a word that might fit on those kinds of headlines, “ _torrid_ affair?”

“Only if you’re planning to give them an ounce of truth,” he hears his guest mutter. Huh.

The elevator opens, and Sam wonders what he’s doing as he leads Adler down the hall. “I’m Sam,” he says. He unlocks the door to his apartment before he even receives a name in response, which is probably a reckless thing to do. (Like inviting strangers into his home.) “Samuel Drake.”

His guest studies him for a moment. “Rafe,” he says.

“Well, Rafe, you’re welcome for saving you from freezing to death.” Sam quirks a grin, noting the redness to Rafe’s cheeks. “Can I get you some coffee?”

“That sounds great. I take it b—”

“Hold on, let me guess.” Sam pauses with a hand on the doorknob, pretending to think. “You take it black when other people are watching, but you actually like it best with a _lot_ sugar.”

Rafe's face fills with surprise. His eyes are hazel. “How ever did you know,” he says dryly, but Sam can see the barest lift of his lips.

Maybe it’s that ghost of a smile that makes it so easy for Sam to open his door to him. “I had a feeling, is all.”

 

 

 

 

** —FEBRUARY THIRD. **

In bed, blinking sunlight away, buried under too many sheets and pillows for one person: This is how he wakes. Slowly, carefully, Sam sits up, and the world rerights itself with him, details filling in like color slowly bleeding into a Polaroid to form the lines and shapes of an image. 

He’s in the apartment, and he’s alone. The calendar tells him that it is three days into February, and the clocks (all six of them scattered around the apartment and synchronized to the second) tell him that it is half past eight o’clock in the morning. His phone sits on the bedside table; he grabs it as he stands, clutching the tiny thing hard when vertigo threatens to knock him off balance. He manages to shove his feet into slippers, though, and heads for the kitchen.

He passes the landline on the way, and it’s muscle memory to press the button as he passes. “You have six missed calls and four new voicemails,” says the automated voice. The numbers make sense for the past five days that he’s neglected to check his phone.

He hates the way _hope_ flickers in his chest. _Stop it. Don’t expect too much._ He plays the voicemails.

_Beep._ “Sam. Hey, ah, I just got a call from Flynn asking me to check on you, so I guess this is me doing that? I’m not really sure what I should be checking in _about_ , but it was…kind of a weird message to get from him. Did something happen? I thought you were just getting ready for that vacation with Rafe—you’re gonna be away for a while, right? I figured, you were busy, you know. Anyway, um, ca—”

_Beep._ “Crap. Got cut off there, sorry. I was gonna say, call or text me, will ya? I’d hate to find out you died of a…I don’t know, a tragic skiing accident or whatever you were doing in Scotland, and have to hear about it from _Flynn_ , of all people. Got that?”

Sam moves through the kitchen, passes by unwashed dishes and various boxes of takeout. _Should probably clean that in case Rafe comes back,_ he thinks, and he catches himself there, unsure when he’d started thinking less _whenever Rafe comes home_ and more _in case Rafe comes back._

_Beep._ “Right, so, you’re officially starting to worry me. Sully said you talked to him recently, what’s the deal with that? He mentioned you didn’t go to Scotland after all, either. I’m guessing since you’re still talking to other people who aren’t me that you’re _alive_ , but it would be nice — as, you know, your _brother_ — to confirm it firsthand. Call me back.”

_Beep_. “Hey, Sam.” He stops by the sink when Elena’s voice fills the apartment instead of Nathan’s. There’s a pause, a sigh, and Elena-from-two-days-ago continues, “Nate’s been worried sick, and I’ve gotta admit, so have I. I don’t know what happened between you and Rafe this time, and you don’t even have to tell us, just—talk to us? It can’t be good, spending all that time alone with your thoughts, you know?” She chuckles softly—not the _you’re so funny_ kind, but the _I don’t know how else to reach out to you_ kind, and the voicemail cuts off in the middle of the sound. The apartment is doused with silence again, and Sam feels like shit for neglecting two of the four people in his life who genuinely care about his well-being—or is it three now? These days, he’s not sure.

He leaves the phone on the counter and begins washing the dishes, systematic and quiet. Someone gave him that advice once, back at the orphanage— _focus on something small and repetitive and don’t think about anything else_. She had been one of the kinder nuns, the only one who didn’t eye him suspiciously all the time and didn’t rat him out when she caught him reading in the library well-past curfew. 

She had suggested music too, something _without words or with lyrics in another language_ _so you don’t have to think,_ but he knows that if he were to turn on the stereo, it would be one of Rafe’s German cassettes (Rafe never took those things out) or public radio, and he’s not sure about either one’s potential to lift his mood.

It’s washing the dishes, then—or cleaning the kitchen in general. _God, it stinks in here_ , he thinks, nose wrinkling as he places the last dishes on the drying rack and turns to the boxes littering the kitchen island, all of them marked with the name of the Chinese place down the street. He fishes out a black trash bag from under the sink, pulls it open, and tosses the boxes in ( _where have you been?_ ) one ( _you never tell me anything anymore_ ) by ( _talking doesn’t always mean communicating_ ) one. 

He ties off the bag with a little more force than necessary, pulling the ties together so hard that the plastic almost rips. For now, he leaves it out on their balcony—not really much of a balcony, it must be two-by-two with enough room for just one chair, but it’s open to the air and will stop the bag from stinking up the place. Once he’s back inside, he throws open the other windows and turns on the ceiling fan, hoping to air out the whole place. It invites in the windchill, but he’s going to be outside soon anyway.

He showers under a scalding hot spray, washing out the grease in his hair, and shaves. That had been part of the nun’s advice too. _Sometimes those feelings of being overwhelmed start to feel physical, so do something that makes you feel weightless._

Sam tries, then, to imagine shearing off the past few weeks as easily as he swipes the razor through shaving cream, but it doesn’t really work because his mind gets specific. _Take away the fight about dinner_ , swipe downward, _the fight about dirty laundry_ , raise his hand upward, _the fight about the apartment,_ swipe downward, _the fight about whatever keeps him out until three in the goddamn morning—_

“Shit!” Red blooms over the right side of his jaw, and he drops the razor and shoves a towel against the wound. For a moment, as he stands there and stares back at the shadow-eyed, gaunt-faced person in the mirror, he feels a spike of resentment towards the nun. _Real fucking helpful advice,_ he thinks, angry, using his other hand to resume shaving as quickly as he can. By the time he finishes, the cut is still weakly bleeding, so he washes it a few times before drying off and sticking a band-aid on. Good as new.

He changes into clean clothes. It’s the opposite of weightlessness, he’s aware, but winters in Boston have never been forgiving, so he slips on at least two layers and the navy blue parka that Rafe always griped about and heads out, keys, cellphone, and half a carton of smokes in hand.

The apartment doesn’t have a five-star view, or a five-star _anything_ , really, but Sam’s always thought its convenient location made up for its shortcomings. At most, it takes twenty minutes to walk to work, ten to a decent restaurant, and five to the park, which finished restorations last fall and reinstalled an ice rink just a few days ago.

Sam lights up a cigarette and takes a long, deep drag, the kind that Rafe would always frown over. Rafe had been doing a lot of frowning lately, especially over his smoking. He used to be able to get away with smoking in bed, but then Rafe began snapping for him to _put it out Sam, Christ, it makes everything in here reek._ Not that Sam listened much. That was how most of their disagreements went lately: Rafe made demands and Sam consciously chose not to fulfill them. 

That was probably Rafe started leaving the bed entirely, despite Sam’s cajoling of _I’m sorry baby_ and _fine I’ll put it out just come back to bed,_ and sometimes even the apartment. In the rare case he stayed, he spent more and more time standing in the balcony than standing in the same room as Sam, which Sam _knew_ he did to be dramatic, because they didn’t have much of a view from there and Rafe wouldn’t otherwise bother with something that bored him.

( _Always so stubborn, aren’t you?_ )

The rink is fairly busy, occupied mostly by couples tripping over themselves in shouts and laughter. Sam takes another deep drag, only able to stand the sight for so long before he looks down at his phone. He has about a dozen notifications from Nathan, which he finally answers with a brief, _I’m okay. Sorry bout the silence, I’ll explain later._ He knows his brother deserves more than that, but that’s a sore subject— _who the hell decides what we deserve?_

He considers calling Rafe again, but he remembers he'll likely run into that prerecorded message— _Sorry, the number you are trying to reach is currently unavailable or out of service. If you believe this is an error, please contact our help center…_

The first time he came across it, about two days ago, he had simply redialed. A mistake on his part, he assumed; he doesn’t have Rafe as a contact, just has his number memorized and punches it in each time he calls. (That used to impress Rafe.) Then the same message came up, and realization hit him and he’d been so _pissed_ that he turned off his cellphone and unplugged the landline for an entire day, even coming close to throwing the latter out entirely.

The last voicemail he’d been able to leave went something like, “I’m at our place today. I miss you. I wish you’d let me apologize.”

Just thinking about those words now evokes the same sense of weariness he had felt two days ago. Oh, he _meant_ them, he means them every time, but the problem is that despite always meaning them, they always come full circle. He’ll apologize to Rafe, Rafe will stop ignoring him, they’ll make up, and there’ll be a happy few days where they will be able to eat together and talk and fuck and actually look at each other in the eye afterward. 

Then, inevitably, something will happen to set off one of their tempers, Rafe’s more often than his, and they’ll fight, and Rafe will leave, and Sam will be pissed for a day before going after him. Rafe’s always been the faster runner in every sense. Sam’s always the one chasing.

“ _—ying to reach is currently unavailable—_ “

“For Chris’sakes, Rafe,” he mutters, jabbing the _end call_ button harder than necessary. 

He never really catches Rafe, he doesn’t think. Rafe just slows down enough for him to catch up, and then they’re on the same pace for a little while until Rafe decides he wants to put distance between them again and takes off, and Sam's left in the dust.

Sam exhales, a ragged breath that billows out in a cloud of either smoke or frost. Rafe’s not worth the frozen fingers, he decides, about to put his phone away and put on gloves, only for his phone to ring at the last second. 

He answers too quickly for someone who’s supposed to be pissed. “Rafe?”

“Er,” comes Nathan’s voice after a small pause, “not exactly. Sorry to disappoint.”

Sam tries not to exhale too loudly again. “It’s fine,” he mumbles, turning to lean against the side of the rink. “I should've known it wasn't him.”

“So the problem  _is_ Rafe,” Nathan says, a touch cautiously.

“I thought you were already sure of that, after Elena’s message.”

“Elena’s?”

“Yeah. From two days ago, about.” A pause. He frowns when he realizes Nathan mustn’t have known. “Shit, sorry. I didn’t know that you didn’t know. Is that a bad thing?” He's not sure why it would be a bad thing. People tell things to each other in relationships, don't they? Isn't it bad when they don't?

“No.” His brother doesn’t sound entirely convincing though, and Sam grimaces when he thinks of what else he might have fucked up this time. “Well, did she have any more luck getting the story out of you?”

“No, if it makes you feel any better.”

“Yeah, no, not really.”

“It was worth a shot.”

He actually gets a dry chuckle from Nathan, which grants him a few seconds’ reprieve to take another drag. Sometimes he thinks that Nathan worries too much to be the younger one.

“Hey, look, will you come over?” Nate asks on cue. “So—“

“—you can interrogate me in real life? I can’t think of a better way to spend my Saturday morning.”

“I was _going_ to say so Cassie can see you and stop asking when you’ll next come over, but you’re right about the interrogation too.”

At the mention of his niece, Sam feels like shit again. “Let me finish my smoke, and I’ll be over.”

He ends up buying three strawberry smoothies on his way there. They’re overpriced and probably loaded with more sugar than real fruit, but they’re Cassie’s favorite and he knows Nate and Elena are partial to strawberries too. He ends up having to call a cab to take him forty-five minutes out to the modest bungalow that Nate and Elena first bought a little over three years ago. It's quaint and domestic and very  _them_.

When he rings their house, it’s Cassie who comes shouting and clamoring to answer the front door. “Uncle Sam!” she squeals, launching herself at him and latching on tight despite Sam’s thick coat.

A laugh tears its way out of Sam’s throat, surprising and genuine as he staggers back a step. “Okay, okay, careful." He balances the carrier on one hand and ruffles her hair with the other. "Look what I got’cha.”

“Smoothies?” Her attention switches quickly enough, eyes flying wide. Sam hands her one of the Styrofoam cups. “Why’s there only three?”

“For you, your mom and dad,” Sam says.

“What about Uncle Rafe?”

“Cassie, what did I tell you about checking before answering the door?” Nathan’s voice from somewhere inside the house saves him from coming up with an answer.

He sees his niece roll her eyes. “It’s just Uncle Sam, Dad, _gosh_.” She walks back in without preamble, and Sam thoroughly kicks off the snow from his boots before coming inside.

He meets Nathan in the living room, where his brother is struggling to hold onto a small puppy and wipe the floor at the same time. Cassie moves to help him, but Sam tells her he’s got it, puts the carrier down, and beckons for Nate to hand the squirming puppy over. “Here, Vicky.”

“Oh, sure, hold the puppy while I clean the floor,” says Nate.

“Don’t mind if I do,” Sam says brightly. “What happened?”

“Vicky’s making slow progress on potty training.”

“We’re teaching her to ring a bell whenever she wants to go,” Cassie reports in between slurps of her smoothie. She’s smart for her age — what do they call it, _precocious_. The first and only time he brought Rafe over, she wrinkled her nose and asked why he needed so much hair gel. That was all it took for Rafe to decide he liked her. “Dad, are you going to drink your smoothie?”

“Why?”

“There's not enough for Uncle Rafe.”

It had amused — and frightened — Sam to hear Cassie refer to Rafe so familiarly. Nathan had been equally stunned, and so was Elena, although she seemed mostly relieved that her daughter proved to get along better with Rafe than Nate did.

The sound of it now, though, brings a dull pang to his chest, one that he tries to push away.

He feels Nathan’s eyes on him, _knowing_ , but he also knows that it would be damning if he looks away, so he looks straight back. “Nah, it’s fine, he can have it. Rafe’s, ah, he's not coming today.”

“Why?”

_Because of me._ “He’s got work to do.”

Cassie looks ready to ask more ( _she really takes after Elena_ ), but Nathan passes her a _look_ , and she pouts and retreats to the couch. She calls Vicky over, and the pup squirms out of Sam’s hold, blunt nails scratching the back of his hands in her rush to get to Cassie.

Nate finishes disinfecting and motions for him to go into the kitchen, so Sam picks up the carrier again and follows. He tells himself it’s so he can put the drinks away, but really, he brings it to act as a dampener for his brother's worry. He doesn't need worry, he needs someone to tell him that everything's going to be okay and that Rafe's going to be back any day now.

“Elena’s still at work?” he tries.

Nathan nods, drying his hands. “She should be home any minute. She’ll be glad to see you, I’m sure.”

There’s something odd about his tone—as if his words are restrained, carefully chosen. It doesn't suit him well; he's always been the more honest and expressive between them. Sam really hopes he hasn't caused anything between him and Elena. "Great."

“Let me guess, you're not talking to Rafe again?” Nate’s voice lowers, even though Sam doubts Cassie can hear them over the sound of the history channel.

“It’s going both ways.”

“Right.”

He’d meant to sound light, but it falls flat, and Nate’s response doesn’t exactly help. His attempt at a smile turns into a grimace halfway, and he takes up one of the smoothies for the sake of putting something between him and Nathan.

“Look,” Nathan says with the hint that this is one of his not-lectures, “have you ever thought that maybe, if it keeps not working out, it’s not, you know, meant to be?”

_Yes, only as many times as you and everyone else has told me to think about it,_ Sam thinks in a flare of defensiveness. That’s bad, he knows, he should probably listen to something that so many people have told him, but he’s always been spiteful that way—one of the things he and Rafe had in common, in fact. Back then, it was a determined  _everyone expects us to crash and burn, you know that?_ and _then we’ll be the one laughing at them five years from now_. 

(Except it hasn’t been five years, has barely even been one, and it’s turned into a more petty  _everyone’s waiting to get to say “I told you so”_ and _I won’t let them._ For him, at least. He’s not sure about Rafe. He doesn’t know what’s on his mind much nowadays.)

Nathan sighs like he knows Sam’s shutting down. Hell, maybe he does know, because Sam doesn’t bother to be subtle about putting on a bored face.

Nathan’s never really liked Rafe. They tolerated each other at best, made barbs-masked-as-small-talk when they were left alone together. It makes sense, then, that Nathan’s always the first to say things like this, and Sam loves his brother and all, but sometimes he wishes Nate would be the first to say something different.

"Fine, you don't want to hear it."

The conversation’s going nowhere, so it’s godsend when he hears the sound of jangling keys and the door being opened. In the living room, Vicky starts up her excited barking, and Sam hears the sound of feet rushing to meet Elena as she walks through the front door. “Vicky! Hello, hi, did you miss me? Hey, Cassie, here, grab her before she gets out.”

She’s bundled up for the weather, struggling to block the doorway with her legs and simultaneously hold onto a handful of grocery bags and a pile of mail. Sam instinctively moves to help, but Nathan’s already there first in one practiced motion, easing two of the bags away and shutting the door for her while Cassie shoos the puppy away. 

“Welcome home,” he hears his brother murmur before he kisses his wife, and Sam feels that he should avert his eyes or something. It's almost too domestic.

“Good to see you’re still alive, Sam,” Elena says when she moves into the kitchen. Her tone is teasing but carries a sense of worry too. “Really almost convinced Nate this time. Oh, and you brought apology smoothies right in time for lunch.”

“Am I really that transparent?” It’s easier to joke with Elena; despite how close they’ve become over the years and despite how observant she is, she hasn’t seen the same things Nate has seen and can’t possibly guess at the depth of the self-hating, very real, in his stomach.

( _You’re a coward, you know that? You can’t even own up to your mistakes._ )

“I started the rice. I would’ve done more, but Vicky had an accident.”

_There’s rice in there,_ Sam might have said instead, _you can take it or leave it. Oh, by the way, the dog pissed on the floor._

“Again?” Elena unwinds her scarf and hangs up her coat in the closet. “That’s the third time this week.”

_Again?_ Rafe might have said in return. _Why didn’t you walk her?_

“Everything’s cleaned up. She’s making progress on the bell, at least.”

( _I cleaned everything up, so I don’t get why you’re mad._ )

“Well, at least she’s improving. I bought those treats she likes, we can feed them to her when she does it right.”

( _Just because_ you _don't understand_ _why I’m mad doesn’t mean I don't have a right to be.)_

“Yeah, good idea.”

( _Christ, Rafe, you know that’s not what I meant, will you stop putting words in my mouth?_ )

“Hey, stranger.” Elena’s addressing him. “If you’re staying for lunch, you’re helping me with the stir fry.”

Sam shrugs. He knows Elena won’t let him get distracted in the middle of cooking, so maybe this will be more effective in terms of clearing his mind. “Sounds fair,” he says easily, and he sees Nate and Elena share some kind of look over the counter before Nate breaks off, starting to put the groceries away.

“Let me get changed first,” Elena says to him with a kind smile, and Sam doesn’t know how or why they keep putting up with him. “Nate, can I talk to you about something?” She’s waving the pile of mail at Nathan, so Sam assumes it's something private.

They head off for now, and Sam picks up where Nate left off with the groceries. It’s the least he can do.

 

 

Cassie compliments him on his cooking, and both Nate and Elena laugh when Sam plays up how much he actually contributed. The scene drips with domesticity—the smell of home cooking in the air, the six-person dining table, Vicky slinking around the legs of their chairs in hopes of scraps. With Cassie next to Elena, Sam initially thought he would have to face all three of them on one side of the table, but when he went to sit down, there was Nate, wordlessly moving his plate to fill in the seat next to Sam. "Thanks," Sam had whispered, and Nate simply bumped their elbows together.

After dinner, Sam washes the dishes. Nate and Elena protest, but Sam doesn't let up and points them to Cassie instead, who is begging to be allowed outside. Apparently, they put up a fence sometime between now and the last time Sam visited, making it look like a proper backyard, Elena says something about getting monkey bars for Cassie, who’s apparently also developed a penchant for climbing things.

Sam relishes in the calm, but he knows the break is coming.

To their credit, they last another hour—after Cassie’s come back inside to Nate’s concerns over windchill, showered down, and settled in the study to read with Vicky. That's when Sam turns off the television, cutting off some show he wasn’t really watching, and braces himself as Nate and Elena join him in the living room.

No one says anything for several minutes, none of them even staring at each other (or maybe Nate and Elena keep looking at each other and Sam just can’t look at either of them to notice), until Elena finally breaks the silence.

“Sam, what’s been happening?”

He resents that it’s her and that he has inadvertently involved her in these kinds of talks. She married Nathan, not Nathan and a plethora of problems that happens to include Sam, Sam and his dysfunctional relationships, Sam and his ever-shifting, never-stilling choice in partners. She shouldn't have to worry about him.

But the urge to decompress overpowers his sense of remorse, and he finds himself telling them anyway because he’s selfish like that: He and Rafe had a fight about a week ago, one that ended yet again with Rafe storming out. It was snowing out. Sam had tried to stop him, but it was hard to talk Rafe out of something he had already set his mind on, and that was why Rafe ended up leaving and Sam let him because that was how their fights went.

He hears Elena sigh when he tells them that.

He went to work the next day with the expectation that Rafe would come back that night like usual, but when he returned, Rafe was still gone and so were most of his clothes. That was when he realized that this might be a little more serious than the _usual_. "He wouldn't answer any of my calls, even when I tried to apologize. I mean, he normally does that, but it only usually lasts a day or two. It's been a week."

He's not sure when he stopped being angry and started worrying instead, only that the former doesn't matter now.

"Then two days ago, I started getting some message about his number being out of service, so— I don’t know, maybe he blocked me, maybe he got a new phone entirely. I got so mad that I turned off my phone and unplugged the landline too.”

He offers it up without the apology he knows it needs. He can’t bring himself to say it; he knows how _stupid_ he sounds now.

“I haven’t heard from him since we fought, so maybe we’re done for good this time. I don’t know.” 

_Maybe we’re done for good this time._ The thought jars him, as if just now hitting him after a week. “Fuck.”

“Sam?”

“I’m okay, just—” God, what had they even been fighting about?

( _“You forgot again, didn’t you?” A derisive laugh. “Well, great. That’s just great. So it’s another night in, sitting on this goddamn couch and pretending to tolerate each other—”_

_“Oh, c’mon, don’t start, Rafe.”_

_“Don’t start? Don’t_ start _? You definitely wouldn’t_ start _anything, so unless_ I _bring it up, nothing gets done! Nothing gets talked about! Everything just sits there like insects crawling under my skin, fucking eating away at me, Sam, and I don’t know how you can stand that, but I can’t. I can’t. I’m sick of it.”_ )

“Just realizing that we’re both idiots, you know.” He laughs hollowly, leaning back against the couch with two fingers pressed to the bridge of his nose.

“Yeah, well, maybe that’s a sign,” Nate says pointedly.

“Nate,” Elena admonishes.

“What? I’m just saying— If it is done for— _If_ , okay, if you’re done for good, maybe it should stay that way. You’ve been on-and-off fighting for months, he runs off, you go after him. If you haven’t been able to fix whatever you’re fighting about, how do you know it can ever be fixed?”

Elena looks on the verge of saying something and Sam pauses before responding, maybe hoping that she’ll tell Nathan he’s wrong, only for her shoulders to slump. She presses her lips together in a line and looks at him apologetically, shrugging in Nathan’s direction, as if to say, _He does have a point_.

And Nathan does—he’s only saying what Sam’s been thinking all week, so why does it grate on Sam’s nerves so much?

( _“Don’t be dramatic. You always say that, but you never do anything about it. That’s_ your _problem, Rafe, you complain about how things are and then you don’t do a damn thing to change them yourself.”_

_Rafe’s jaw tightening, his eyes going cold. “Maybe this time I will.”_ )

There’s still daylight out, Sam notes, that’s a little funny. This doesn’t sound like a conversation compatible with sunshine and rolling sheets of glistening, untouched snow.

“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” he says, not really hearing himself. It’s what Nathan wants to hear; maybe it’s what they all need to hear. “Hey, um, thank you. For having me over and for helping out—I really appreciate it. I don’t know where I’d be without you guys.”

“Probably eaten up by all those thoughts?” Elena suggests, trying for a smile, and Sam really has to try and smile back.

“Probably.” He stands, feeling gargantuan and awkward and out-of-place in this house suddenly. “I should head home, though. I still have a bunch of sh—” He stops short when Cassie’s voice floats in, calling for her mother from the next room. “—stuff to clean up. Maybe pack up his stuff for him, make it easier if he comes by to get the rest of it.”

There he goes again, _if_ not _when._

“Yeah, sure, I’ll walk you to the door.” Nate begins to stand up, only to stop at the edge of the couch, catch Elena’s gaze, and slowly ease back. “Or— I’ll go see what Cassie needs. You should take some of the leftovers, there’s plenty.”

He doesn’t quite catch Elena’s expression, but she looks amiable enough when she walks him to the door.

“I’m sorry,” she murmurs after he’s got his coat and shoes back on.

Sam assumes she’s talking about how the conversation went—he shrugs, putting on a little smile. “It’s fine. It’s good advice.” _Lots of people have given me good advice. When am I going to start listening?_

“No, I mean, about Rafe.” She glances briefly over her shoulder — Nate is disappearing down a hall, calling after Cassie. “I’m still rooting for you two, if it’s any consolation at all.” She smiles wryly. She can’t possibly mean it, she’s just saying it to be nice, so Sam nods gratefully.

“Elena?”

She starts at the sound of her name, a hand poised to open the door for him.

“I’ll see myself out,” he assures her. “You should go see what it is. Nathan with Cassie—it’s practically like two five-year-olds, you know?”

He’s glad when she laughs, even though he knows it doesn’t come close to making up for what he puts them through. “Come by more often, okay?”

“I will.”

It’s colder outside, the sun beginning to touch the skyline in its descent. The weather has been odd like that lately—sunshine with brittle cold, like nature can’t decide which one to commit to.

He checks his phone, unsurprised at the lack of messages. He calls Flynn on the cab ride home, gets voice mail, and hangs up without leaving a message.

About a block away from the apartment, a storefront catches his eyes, and he scrambles to stop the driver. She looks irritated but stops anyway, abruptly pulling the cab up to the sidewalk, and he pays what it would have cost to take him to his apartment.

_Ethereal Glassware_ is printed above the little shop in looping, translucent cursive. Sandwiched between a travel agency and a pawn shop, it used to be an empty building up for lease. Rafe had been the one to point out the _Coming Soon!_ sign when the building was first bought, and Sam, seeing the way his eyes lit up, had suggested they come back when it opened.

As soon as he walks in, he thinks, _Rafe would love it here._ The store is furnished almost entirely by black furniture, reminding him of those high-end jewelry stores that Rafe liked to pull him into. The black allows for sharp between the shelves and the glass sculptures displayed around the store, and when he moves through the store, the light bounces off different places at once in an imitation of the night sky. 

A sign boasts that they’re all handcrafted, which must justify the prices. Sam wanders for a few minutes, starting to feel awash, until he sees  _it._

He walks out of the store with the spent money on his mind, but he tells himself, _It’s worth it. He’ll love it. He’s worth it._

When he gets home, he puts the box inside a drawer, to be discreet but easily findable in case Rafe comes back.

_When_ , he tells himself as he closes the windows back up, _when, when, when._

When?

 

 

 

 

** —FEBRUARY FOURTH. **

Rafe left his sleeping aides, Sam had realized sometime in the night. 

This morning, he barely wakes up in time for work, but he has enough time to think, _He wouldn’t possibly leave without those._

Work doesn’t do much to distract him; he’s starting to think _he’s_ just getting harder to distract. He leaves the office with a dozen different subcontractors to call and not enough concentration to sit down for a single one, so he's glad when Harry Flynn calls him as soon as he steps foot into the apartment.

“Sam,” Flynn greets jovially, his accent sounding even thicker over the phone. “I saw you tried to call yesterday, sorry I missed it. I was busy with an, ah, appointment.”

Sam rolls his eyes at the flimsy cover up, but he doesn’t point it out. Flynn’s been involved with some kind of private work over the years, the legality of which Sam has wondered but known better than to ask about.

“Is there something I can do for you?”

“Yeah, I heard you were the one who tipped me off to Nathan,” he says. He’s not particularly upset (some part of him is even grateful for it), just curious as to how Flynn of all people heard about him. _Does Rafe know him? Maybe he’s heard about Rafe recently—_

“Did you really.” Flynn’s voice muffles for a moment, though Sam catches something like _told the bastard not to tell._ Sam frowns. “Yes, I’m the one who told him. I hadn’t heard from you in a while, so I was wondering if you were still kicking.”

“That’s all?”

Flynn replies too quickly, “That was all, mate. Jeez, am I not allowed to ask after the well-being of a friend?”

Sam snorts. “Yeah, well, I was just calling to say thanks for the concern. Bye, Flynn.”

Flynn is beginning to grumble something else when Sam hangs up. He’s fairly certain that Flynn was lying, though it’s the implications of him lying that really bother Sam. _Say Rafe does know him. Flynn’s said he’s got connections, so maybe he’s run into Rafe’s business before. Rafe makes it pretty clear when he’s pissed about something, so maybe Flynn noticed and couldn’t keep his nose out of it— Yeah. That wouldn’t be so farfetched._

Trying to shake it off, he sits at the desk wedged between the doorway and the bedside table and opens his laptop. He considers using his personal email, but there’s a thought of _what if he blocked that too_ , so he opens his work email and types out a message.

_Whenever you feel like coming home, I’ll be here._

His fingers hover over the keys, indecisive.

_I miss you. I’ll be here whenever you want to come home._

It doesn’t feel right.

_I miss you. I’m sorry. If you’ll hear me out, I’ll meet you at our place._

God, doesn’t that sound trite— _their_ place. But it twists something in him, makes the need to apologize suddenly more urgent, and he can only hope it might have a similar effect on Rafe.

He sends it off to Rafe’s work email, the only place he can reach him now, and shuts his laptop. Then, against better reason, he zips his coat back up — he hadn’t bothered to take it off before sitting at the desk — and goes out for the rink.

The rink. _The Golden Hind._ Sam doesn’t need to read the plaque to know that’s what it’s called and what it references; he remembers when Rafe first led him to it, blindfolded, and surprised him, looking simultaneously proud and nervous, _What do you think?_ (Sam had kissed his doubt away, _I love it, I love you._ )

He’s not sure where Rafe considers his home to be, but he can’t possibly mistake their place for anything else. Sam knows it.

The rest is just a matter of waiting.

He finds himself heading to the rink without really thinking about it. _You idiot, he can’t possibly see the message and meet you here within five minutes_ , he thinks, but of course he lingers anyway, hoping and waiting, the black box stuffed deep into the pocket of his coat.

 

 

 

 

** —FEBRUARY SIXTH. **

He comes down with a mild cold, which puts a dent in his plan to visit Nate again later. Nate will probably take one look at him and figure out that Sam hasn’t taken his advice at all, and that’s the last thing Sam needs right now.

Common sense tells him he should stay inside, but it’s actually easier for him to ignore his own advice. Out he goes, then, wearing one more layer than usual (he’s not a _complete_ idiot) and heading towards the rink. He gets there early enough to snag a bench, though fifteen minutes later his cigarette doesn’t prove to be a reliable source of warmth, and he has to get up and walk around the park to keep the blood flowing in his system.

He eats lunch at Equator, the Thai restaurant Rafe loved ( _loves_ ) so much. It sits across the Chinese restaurant that Sam frequents, and Sam used to joke about that, used to bump their shoulders together and tease, _See, even the streets want us together._

That had been a stupid thing to say. These streets and these shops have been here for years, well before the universe decided to throw them together that night in the _courtyard full of_   _wine and music, people spilling out of the hotel and into the streets, all of them dressed in tailored suits or flowing dresses, and Rafe, the only one in white, standing out from the crowd in every sense for Sam._

Rafe doesn’t come today.

 

 

 

** —FEBRUARY SEVENTH. **

Not today.

 

 

 

** —FEBRUARY EIGHTH. **

Not today.

 

 

 

** —FEBRUARY ELEVENTH. **

Nate’s the one who points out that he looks like hell, and Elena’s the one who offers their guest bedroom for _as long as you need it, okay?_  Both of them have a hand in convincing him to stay, though he’s not sure how much convincing he really needs. 

It’s becoming near unbearable to be in the empty apartment. He’s packed up Rafe’s things like he said he would, but it doesn’t matter because Rafe’s also in the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and not just in the metaphorical sense—there’s a stain on the ceiling from where they first tried to cook spaghetti together, a scratch in the floorboards from one of Rafe’s fencing swords, numerous holes that they’ve driven in the wall to hold up picture frames of all the places they planned to visit someday—Sam can’t just shut _those_ away in a box.

After dinner, he and Nathan help Cassie with her spelling list. The steady rhythm of her voice does something to soothe him.

Eventually, though, Elena comes to take her upstairs for a bath, and Sam’s left on the floor with Nathan and the bowl of strawberries they had been sharing with Cassie.

“You know,” Nathan says, picking one up for himself, “I’m not sure how this family came to be obsessed with strawberries.”

“You don't remember?” He’s sure Nate's just trying to make small talk, but he gives him an answer anyway. “You’ve loved them practically since you were Cassie’s age. Remember those strawberry pancakes Mom used to make?”

Nate looks confused. “No?”

“You were probably too young to remember.” Sam smiles at the bittersweet memory. “That’s too bad. They were the best.”

“I bet.”

“I still miss her a lot.”

“Yeah. Yeah, me too.”

They don’t talk about it much anymore, their dead mother and their deadbeat father, and Sam’s not sure why he brought up the memory in the first place. He thinks it has something to do with this family he’s surrounded by. He’s happy for Nathan, wholeheartedly and sincerely, but there’s family and there’s _Family_ , and both Nate and Elena have made it clear that he’s welcome here any time but he knows they have something that's  _theirs_ , separate from him.

It's not a bitter thought. Just...a thought.

“Sam,” Nate says after a while, “I really think you should try to move on," and maybe Sam's starting to want to listen to him.

_Has_ Rafe _moved on?_

Does he want to know?

 

 

 

 

** —FEBRUARY TWELFTH. **

Today. _Today._

Sam doesn’t recognize him at first, but as he draws closer to the spot on the rink he’s regularly occupied for the past several days, he begins to see familiar details in someone from the crowd: Chestnut brown hair slicked back, a strong brow, a straight back.

“Rafe,” he says before he’s even close enough, but maybe the wind carries his voice because Rafe turns just slightly.

Their eyes lock, and Sam rushes through a familiar series of emotions: _Relief, panic, desperation to apologize._ Shit, he’d forgotten the box at the apartment today. _Doesn’t matter, I’ll convince him to come home with me, and I’ll give it to him then._

Rafe cocks an eyebrow at him, giving no indication that he’s sharing any of the turmoil bubbling in Sam’s stomach. “Hi?” he asks, flippant.

_ I didn't mean what I said that night. Will you please come back? _

“Babe, there you are,” cuts in someone else, and Sam turns to the man trying to butt in, annoyed, but then that man is looping an arm around Rafe’s waist and kissing him, and Sam’s thoughts go very quiet.

( _Who is he?_ )

Rafe twists away after a few seconds, looking embarrassed, and he turns back to Sam like Sam’s the one intruding. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

"You lied to me," Sam says.

Rafe is now looking at him uncomfortably, flinching away when tries to move in closer. "He said he doesn't know you," says the man with his arm still around Rafe's waist. "Back off."

"You said you'd never _—_ "

"I said _back off_." 

Sam turns to the man.

_He kissed Rafe in front of him, in front of the rink, in front of_ their _goddamn—_

—a blink, or maybe longer, did he black out? Pain ringing through his knuckles, the dull sound of something hitting the floor, startled shouting—

“What the _hell_?”

—something colliding _hard_ with the side of his head, knocking him straight to the floor too. He makes the same dull sound and thinks, _Oh, I punched the guy off his feet,_ then, _Good,_ all until he looks up and sees Rafe looking back down at him, seething.

_Rafe...hit me?_

“Next time I see your face, you’re dealing with my lawyers,” Rafe hisses. He helps the other man up and then they’re gone, pushing through the small crowd that’s gathered around them and leaving Sam on the ground, lost.

“What an asshole,” he hears someone mutter, probably directed at him. He should also probably get up from the ground, but he’s a little too fixated on the pain in his fist, still clenched tight against the cold grass.

Rafe’s walking away, out of reach, like always, _like always_ —

 

 

Elena’s the only one home when he abruptly stops by, and he almost turns around and starts running for somewhere else after all if not for her quick reaction, grabbing him by the arm and insisting, _Sam, come on, come inside, you don’t wanna do this out there._

“Do what? Do _what_?” He must sound crazed — _that’s probably what she means_ — and he’s glad Cassie isn’t there to see him like this.

“Sam, I need you to calm down. _Sit_.”

Vicky whines, sniffing around his leg, and he forces himself into a stool by the counter so he doesn’t step on her by accident. He’s not really sure how he made it all the way out here without being run over or something; he’s having trouble focusing on anything in his sight.

“Come on, hold this. Your hands are freezing.”

She hands him a steaming mug of something — Sam thinks he smells hot chocolate — and the warmth registers dully against the nerves of his hands. “I saw him today,” he utters.

( _Can you repeat that? Jesus, sometimes I can’t understand what you’re saying._ )

“Saw who?” Elena prompts.

“Rafe.” He expects to hear himself say it with venom, with _hate_ , but he just sounds weak. _Feels_ weak. “He was with someone else—Christ, he was kissing someone else, and I still have a box of his things at home. Isn’t that fucked up?”

“Sam.”

“Some other guy kissed him, and Rafe _let_ him, and then he turned to me and asked if he knew me, like I wasn’t even a _name_ to him anymore— How do you do that, Elena? How could he _do_ that?”

He feels tricked, like he’s been waiting and waiting at the same place for so long, thinking Rafe that Rafe will someday come back, when in reality Rafe has never stopped moving forward, moving _on,_ without him.

Something cold presses against his cheek—he jumps, almost spilling the mug, but it’s just Elena, holding him still with one hand and pressing an ice pack to his face with the other. “Sam, you can keep talking if you need to, but you have to calm down, okay?”

He’s vaguely aware of more words coming out of his mouth, but he’s not sure of much beyond the warmth, the cold, and the hurt, hurt, _hurt._ He raises a hand to take the ice pack from her and hold it himself, but she shakes her head and tells him to keep his hands warm. “We’ll probably have to put some ice on your hand, though. Did you say you punched him?”

Did he? He’s not sure how much he’s said. “Yeah. His face was harder than most people’s.”

Elena cracks a small grin, but Sam can't find the energy to smile back. All he's thinking is  _he lied he lied he lied_ and it's really not helping his nerves. God, he needs a smoke.

He's about to make some excuse to go outside and light one when Nate comes walking in through the door and the first thing Elena says is, “Nate, I think we need to tell him.”

Nate's got Cassie half-asleep in his arms. “What’s going on?” he asks, looking between them apprehensively, and Cassie is the only thing that's stopping Sam from demanding  _tell me what?_

“Nate—” 

“I— Hold on, I’m going to put her to sleep. I’ll be back, just. _Wait_ for me, okay?” 

When Nate goes to drop her off in her room, Sam asks Elena as calmly as he can, “Tell me what?”

Elena studies him, her expression a mixture of pity and guilt, and she finally steps away and lets Sam hold the ice pack on his own. “I’m sorry,” she begins, which is never a good sign. “I wanted to tell you in the first place, but Nate thought—well, we _both_ decided it would be too much, and—” She walks around to the other side of the counter where there’s a pile of papers, envelopes, and pages from newspapers. Sam catches a glimpse of their address and figures it’s their mail pile but doesn’t understand why Elena is pulling something out from there, a goldenrod-yellow paper the size of a postcard. “Here.”

She offers it to him, and Sam stares. 

“Elena,” comes his brother’s voice from behind them. He sounds _scared_. 

“Nate,” Elena says, sounding exhausted, “he saw Rafe with someone else today. He deserves to know.”

“I deserve to know what?” There’s that word again, _deserve_ , like anyone besides him knows what the hell _he_ deserves. He’s not even sure _he_ knows, so how would they? “Nathan.” He levels a stare at his brother. He could just take the card, he thinks, but there’s dread beginning to build in his gut and it feels like if he takes that paper, he will never be able to take it back. Maybe that's why he looks to his brother, hoping one last time that he'll say something reassuring. “Did you know about Rafe?”

“Sort of.” Nathan sighs, rubbing the back of his head and shifting in place like he doesn’t want to be there. 

"Sort of?" Sam repeats. " _Sort of_?"

“It's not what you think! Just. Just read the card and don’t freak out, okay? Read it, and— and we’ll explain.”

Elena doesn’t look at him when he snatches the card, and in the kitchen he reads the text printed across the card, blunt and without decoration. “ _Rafe Adler has erased Samuel_ … What the hell?”

“Sam—”

**_Rafe Adler_ ** _has erased_ **_Samuel Drake_ ** _from their memory. Please refrain from mentioning their relationship again._

“What the hell is this?”

“It’s some sort of— _business_ , okay?” Nate sighs, and Sam bites back the _and what the fuck is that supposed to mean_ because, he reminds himself, his brother's explaining, soon everything's going to make sense. “Apparently, you can pay this company to erase someone from your memory, and you go in and they have a machine that can do just that. We had no idea it existed until Elena did a story on it a few months ago."

_Stop rambling, answer me, tell me what this has to do with me and Rafe—_

"We never thought it could be real, so when we got _this.._."

“When?” He’s having trouble seeing anything past the card, the words. "When did you get this?"

_Rafe Adler has erased Samuel Drake from their memory. Rafe Adler has erased Samuel Drake from their memory._

Neither Nate nor Elena respond for a few seconds, and Sam says through gritted teeth, “I’m not mad, Nathan, just _tell me_.”

“That day I called you and told you to visit. Elena came back with the mail, and, do you remember, she pulled me aside before you started making lunch—”

“Yeah. Yeah, I remember.”

_ Rafe Adler has erased Samuel Drake. _

“We’re so sorry, Sam,” Elena says softly. “We wanted to look into it first, make sure it was real before bringing it to you. The company that does it, Lacuna, they’ve only got a dozen or so locations across the country, but there happens to be one at the edge of the city. We came in, and it turns out that Nate knew a few people there.”

At that, he looks up at Nathan, hurt, and Nathan's eyes flit away, guilty. “I found out that Flynn works there. I didn’t know, all right? When he first called me asking to check on you, I thought he was genuinely worried about you. I had no idea he knew about this."

"You should have told me. Right when you got it, you should have showed me instead of letting me keep thinking that Rafe would actually come back—"

“We didn’t know you would run into Rafe ever again, okay? When you came over that day, you made it sound like you and Rafe were done—”

“Nathan,” Elena whispers sharply.

“Yeah, but that doesn't mean you don't  _tell_ me, Nathan, Christ!”

“How the hell were we supposed to, Sam?”

"You should have  _tried_ —”

“All right, no, Sam,  _hey_ —” Sam doesn’t realize he has stood up and taken a step forward until Elena is putting herself bodily between him and Nathan. 

Sam steps back, feeling a sudden rush of guilt— _I wasn’t going to do anything_ , he wants to say, but the look that Elena gives him compels him to shut his mouth. “We wanted to, Sam, okay?” she says, far more calmly than he and Nathan had been. “But we didn’t know how. We know it’s terrible, and we shouldn’t have kept it from you for as long as we did, but...can you imagine having to tell someone something like _that_?” She trails off, waving listlessly at the paper in Sam’s hand.

"Yeah, well, imagine having to _hear_ it." The feeling in his fingers have mostly returned by now, and he can feel the paper crumpling with the force of his grip. He wills himself to relax, to breathe—he remembers Cassie’s still in the house and tells himself, _Calm down, you don’t want to wake her,_ but it’s hard when all he keeps thinking about are those words on that damn paper.

Elena looks over to Nate, who’s supporting himself heavily against the counter. Then she looks back over to Sam and offers hesitantly, “I think you should go to their office in the city. Talk to Flynn.”

“What?” Nate says immediately, head shooting up. “No.”

“Nate, he _needs_ this.”

“No, what he needs is— He needs to move on.”

Sam bristles. “Don’t talk about me like I’m not here.”

“Fine. You need to move on, Sam.” Nate fixes him with an expression that Sam’s never seen on him before—a grimly determined look that says, _I know you don’t like hearing this, but this is what needs to happen._ “Rafe obviously has.”

A beat of silence. In it, Sam hears two ticks of the clock—Nate and Elena only have one in this room, which makes him think of the six that he’s got hanging around the apartment at Rafe’s insistence— Rafe, who erased him, Rafe, who moved on, Rafe, Rafe.

“That,” he says, forcing his voice not to waver, “is a real shitty thing to say, Nathan.”

He leaves their house without so much as calling a cab. That's fine, he needs a walk anyway. Never mind that the night is well-settled in, dark and cloudy, the full moon hanging up there like an eye peering in on his misery.

He left the paper, he realizes vaguely. He unclenches his fist and finds his palms empty but littered with crescent-shaped marks from his nails. He shoves his hands into his pockets so he doesn't have to look at them.

It doesn't matter that he left the paper. He practically has the image of it seared into the backs of his eyelids anyway. 

_Rafe Adler has erased Samuel Drake from their memory. Please refrain from mentioning their relationship again._

They bolded their names, he remembers. A stupid detail, but it makes him think of the automated emails they sometimes send out at work, _Dear_ ** _CLIENT NAME_** _, we are writing to inform you…_ He imagines the person in charge of printing out those papers, sitting unaffected at their computer, mechanically substituting one name for another, punching in keystrokes without a thought about the lives, the _people_ , that those papers will touch.

He makes it to some desolate pizzeria, where he uses a payphone and a wrinkled calling card on their bulletin board. Thankfully, the driver doesn’t try to make conversation beyond the _you know how much a forty-minute ride’s gonna cost ya, right?_ and Sam nodding passively. The silence means he has time to think.

When he gets back to his apartment, he rings Flynn as many times as it takes for him to finally answer, which ends up being nine times, then four more times when Flynn hears his demands and hangs up on him. 

By the time Sam’s said his piece, it’s almost eleven at night, and he knows what he wants to do.

 

 

 

 

** —FEBRUARY THIRTEENTH. **

Lacuna, Inc. is a small but practical building, covered in off-white paint on the outside and slightly peeling blue wallpaper on the inside. The floor is made of linoleum and glints dully, hideously under the fluorescent lights, looking less shiny and more greasy. The chairs are at least cushioned, and there are plenty of books shoved into a tall shelf by one of the windows. Some of them are displayed on the glass coffee table in the waiting area, bearing titles like _The Persistence of Our Memories_ and _Wrangling with Your Grief._ It feels like the interior decorator couldn’t decide whether they wanted the place to more resemble a clinic, a dentistry, an airport, or a confusing amalgamation of all three.

Sam feels out of place here, still semi-dressed for work. There’s only one other person in the waiting room with him, an elderly woman with an bulging bag by her feet. Sam tries not to stare, but the things are practically there for the world to see—the corner of a blue blanket, the head of a rattle, a small shoe. 

Someone calls his name and he looks over quickly, seeing Flynn appear behind the receptionist’s desk. “Good to see you in the flesh again, mate,” he says, which sounds normal enough, but Sam can sense the underlying tension there from the previous night’s conversation. _Good_ , he thinks, _let him squirm_. 

“Dr. Frazer will be right with you, ma’am,” Flynn tells the elderly woman, who gives no indication that she heard him. Then he ushers Sam behind the desk, into a some sort of break room with a few counters, a mini fridge, and a table. There's a computer desk in the corner, and there are yellow papers everywhere.

There's another thing about them that strikes Sam: they’re an ugly shade of yellow that almost resembles gold, as if this is a grand piece of news to receive. It makes him think of _Charlie and the Chocolate Factory_ , and he almost laughs right there. _Open your chocolate bar and you might get a golden ticket! See if a loved one erased someone from their memory today!_

On the desk, there’s a printer spitting out even more of them. Each one bears different bolded names, numerous Chrises and Joshes and Samanthas that have chosen to raze people from their lives. _To raze, to erase, to annihilate_ —to murder a memory. 

“Tea, coffee?” Flynn offers casually, walking over to a coffee maker humming on the counter.

Sam shakes his head no. It feels like a morgue in here.

“Most of them are mutual decisions, you know.” Flynn gestures for him to sit at the table. Sam gingerly lowers himself into a chair, mindful of the piles of paper. “Usually, a couple will come in together and request erasures of each other. When it’s one-sided, we make sure the person has prepared for the, er, fallout on their own. Like Mrs. Hughes out there. She’s the last living person from her family, so there’s really no hazard of any loved ones finding out that she’s wiped her dead son from her memory.”

Sam has to close his eyes at Flynn’s tone—so blasé, unaffected, like the printer churning out those papers one name after another.

“Sorry.” When he opens his eyes, Flynn doesn’t look sorry at all as he raises a mug of coffee in mock toast. “Working here requires a degree of desensitization.”

“I bet,” Sam says.

Flynn sighs, placing his mug on the table and taking a seat across from Sam. He places both elbows on the table, leans in. He’s wearing a lab coat with _FLYNN_ nametagged above his left breast pocket, like some kind of doctor. “All right, look, I’ve already apologized, so can you try not to glare at me every chance you get?”

“Your sensibilities aren’t exactly on my list of priorities right now,” Sam tells him.

Flynn looks ready to retort but holds back at the last second. “Are you here to take my offer or not?”

“I want to know more about it first.” Sam’s gaze inadvertently shifts to the topmost paper of one pile; it looks like a consent form of sorts. He wonders if those should be out in plain view.

“ _It_? What do you mean by _it —_ the process? The aftermath? The crippling emotional pain that drives people here in the first place?”

_Crippling emotional pain? Is that what Rafe felt?_ “The process,” he says stiffly. _Why did he never tell me he wasconsidering this?_

“You would start by filling out a form. Legal stuff, you understand—making sure you’re consenting to the process, you understand the ramifications, et cetera. Then we conduct an interview on record, and you’ll answer some questions that will become reference material once we start your brain scans. Then you go home, collect every single thing you own that is remotely connected to the person you want to erase, and bring it to us. We’ll use them to create a map of your memories, pinpoint the parts of your brain affected by each one. As for the actual operation, you’ll be given an anesthesia, hooked up to our wiper, and one of our doctors will systemically go through each memory and delete them.”

“And afterwards, I’ll wake up here?”

“No, you’ll wake up the next morning at home. You’ll have to have someone we can contact at the end of your session, someone you trust to get you home safely. We leave _that_ part up to you.”

And then, a question that he doesn’t particularly care about but finds himself asking anyway: “Will it hurt?”

Flynn smiles ruefully, like it’s one he’s resigned to answering. “No. We also do you the favor of erasing any memory you have of this company, so that the faint-hearted don’t have to live with it on their conscience.”

Sam frowns. “So there’s no way to reverse it?”

Flynn shoots him a look that says, _Do you really need to ask?_ “Absolutely not. Even if there was, there’s no way the company would allow it—that’s where the ethics can get a bit nasty, if you know what I mean. We keep it simple: You pay, give us your consent, and acknowledge that it’s irreversible.”

“So even if you fuck up, they won’t remember to sue you.”

“Interesting that you’ve gotten so scrupulous, Samuel.” Rafe used to call him Samuel. When Flynn says it, Sam wants to deck him across the face. “But if that’s your mindset, I should be glad I’m offering it to you _pro bono_ , huh?”

_Only because you know you slipped, and I’m a liability._ It _is_ a benefit, though. He wouldn’t have been able to cover the cost himself otherwise — he’d already spent much of the money he originally set aside for Scotland. “Can it be done in a day?”

Flynn raises an eyebrow, the beginnings of a smile pulling at his lips. Maybe he knows that Sam’s had an answer since the night before. “Eager, are we?”

“Just answer the question, Flynn.”

“Yes, if we start early.”

“Good.” He clamps his mouth shut after that word. There’s nothing _good_ about this.

_Yes there is. You’re going to erase him, like he erased you. You’re going to make it even, make it_ fair.

That was another ugly trait he and Rafe shared: They were both vengeful. _Maybe that was part of the problem. We were too alike in all the bad ways and none in the good._

“You want to do this, then?” Flynn prompts.

Sam thinks of Rafe being asked this same question. How did he answer—firmly or furtively? How long did he take to make a decision? _How badly did I fuck up for him to even consider going this far?_

“Yeah,” he says. “I do.”

“Great. We do it tomorrow. If you’re _really_ eager, do the clean-out tonight and bring it with you when you come back, so we can do the brain scans right after your interview.”

“I don’t even have to wait until tomorrow,” he says, realizing. “I already have his stuff packed.” He tries to look around for a clock but estimates it must be around two in the afternoon—how long could the procedure possibly take? His heart quickens at the thought of doing it now and waking up as early as the next day a changed person— _I’ll be freer. Happier._

_Won’t I?_

He thinks of Rafe, how _fine_ he had been on that day, able to touch the rails of the rink without flinching from the memories, how _easily_ he had been able to let that man kiss him. 

_I will._

“No, we’ll keep it for tomorrow.”

His eyes snap to Flynn's. “Why?”

“Jesus, mate, to give you some time to think about it, how about that?” Flynn laughs, but oddly enough there’s no meanness in it. He stands and turns to wash his mug in the sink, and Sam doesn’t know him well enough to read his posture. “It’s less than twenty-four hours. You can make it 'til then. Once it’s done, you won’t even remember enough of this to regret it, so give yourself some time to consider it.”

Sam feels something digging hard into his hand and realizes he’s gripping the metal arm of the chair too tightly. He lets go, stands up. There’s that feeling again, of being too big for the room, heavy-limbed and unfitting.

“How long did it take for him to decide?”

He doesn’t expect an answer, given that Flynn has evaded all his other ones about Rafe with excuses of _that’s confidential, sorry_ , but Flynn surprises him by saying, “Pretty quickly, I imagine.”

Sam thought the answer might be something like that. _If I knew he was going to say that, then why does it hurt?_  “You weren’t…assigned to his case?”

“No, I just talked him through the paperwork. Chloe— Ah, Dr. Frazer around here, she and someone else took care of him."

“But you saw him.”

Flynn pauses, though he continues to wash his mug. “I did.”

“Was— How was he? Was he…unhappy?”

“Well, you’d have to be pretty unhappy to come here, don’t you?”

Sam never thought of them as unhappy, though. There were times when they were happy and times when they were _not_ happy, and Sam knows happiness is a spectrum because if it was black-and-white, they would have never come back to each other after their first fight. “I s’pose,” he says without much meaning.

“Just go home and make _sure_ you have all of his things packed,” Flynn suggests without looking over his shoulder. “That means any of his things, any journal entries that mention him, any calendars with his birthday on it, anything that might remind you that this was once someone you gave a damn about.” A pause, deliberate. “Who knows, you might see something that’ll change your mind.”

 

 

 

There’s a cruelty in not being allowed to smoke during the one thing that he might need an entire carton of cigarettes for, which is why he puts off even looking at the box until he absolutely has to. By then, it’s nighttime and it’s quiet, and he immediately regrets not doing it when the sun was out and things didn’t look so fucking depressing.

He’d packed Rafe’s things in the only box he could find, a faded, worn-looking thing with a hole on one of the top flaps. He readies two plastic bags before finally yanking the box out from its sad corner and bringing it to the light.

He doesn’t last a minute—he opens the damn thing and sees a paper filled with Rafe’s neat, slanted scrawl, and his vision blurs. “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, _shit_.” The expletives lose their meaning after the third time he repeats the mantra, pressing the back of his hand hard into his eyes.

_Stop crying._ Stop _. Do you think_ he _cried?_

Somehow it’s not a comforting thought at all, and he wishes he had a cigarette to take a drag from. He’s never liked crying for how messy it is—his head fills up with cotton, his throat gets tight. It feels like being suffocated, like some invisible hand gripping him around the middle and squeezing tight, tight, tight, trying to wring the tears out of him.

( _“Don’t you dare open the door, Sam.” Rafe’s voice, firm but cracking, muffled from the other side of the wood._

_“It’s okay to cry, Rafe. It’s okay— Let me help. Let me in, let me help you,_ please _.”_ )

“Just don’t look,” he mutters to himself, inhaling shakily. “Don’t look, yeah, don’t look.”

(But he also doesn’t need to look to know that the paper contained Rafe’s handwritten notes on what they could do in Scotland, before that all went to shit. He doesn’t need to look to know that there are eight travel brochures packed in a manila envelope marked _VISITED_.)

He unpacks the box methodically, replacing the items in a large garbage bag. Trying to think of _weightlessness_ doesn’t work because he’s only transferring them to another place, isn’t he, they’re not really going away, not for good.

_Focus._

The box is empty soon enough — Rafe was more or less living with him for months (had referred to the apartment as “home”), but he never brought over much of his things. Rafe claimed most of them were unnecessary, that he saw enough of them whenever he was around his parents. (There, that was another part of the problem: Rafe kept some fraction of his life carefully separate from Sam. He shut down whenever Sam asked about the business, went rigid every time Sam mentioned his parents, and became especially cold when Sam asked about his father.)

What Rafe did leave around his apartment were strange but sentimental things, like the shark’s tooth he claimed to have found during their trip to the beach and the label of the wine bottle they shared over one night in Italy.

Into the bag they go, right along with everything else. When the box is empty, he nudges it aside and opens up a second bag for the rest of the apartment. He has to take a few minutes to dissuade himself from hunting for a cigarette before starting his first round, sweeping through the entire apartment and picking up any remaining evidence that Rafe too once called this place home. The bag turns up lighter than he expected, so he goes through the apartment a second time (wishing all the more that he could have a smoke), and he ends up with one and a half bags that are supposed to emblemize Rafe. At the end of it, Sam debates the clocks, the only thing that he never understood from Rafe’s odd collections, but none of them bear Rafe’s name or any explicit mention of him, so he feels safe enough to leave them. He doesn’t think he can take down all of them without hurting himself anyway.

He forces himself to take a shower before going to sleep.

 

 

 

 

** —FEBRUARY FOURTEENTH. **

He showers again after he wakes up. He’s not sure what he keeps trying to wash off, but it doesn’t feel like it’s working. 

Breakfast consists of two granola bars and orange juice that he has to force himself to swallow. He doesn’t have much of an appetite, but Flynn suggested he should eat something, since the process was going to take a full day.

He has a message from Sully, to which he replies with a simple _Thanks_. 

He leaves Nathan a message of his own explaining what he’s going to do, but he assumes Nathan has already heard from Flynn—they’ve always had some strange friendship that originated years before Sam properly met him. Maybe Flynn saved him the trouble and also convinced Nathan that Sam _wants_ to do this, and that’s why he has no messages or missed calls from his brother nor Elena. That would make things easier.

( _That’s always how you want things—easy. You never make an effort. Well, don’t worry, I’ll make this easy for you._ )

Before he leaves, his phone buzzes and reminds him that it’s Valentine’s Day, complete with a list of local events. It’s impeccable timing.

The waiting room is empty when he arrives at Lacuna, and Flynn is behind the receptionist’s desk again, conversing with a dark haired woman. Both of them are wearing white lab coats, and Sam idly wonders if they even have a receptionist somewhere or if they just take turns. How many people does take to do the operation? It sounds like the start of a joke. 

“Samuel,” Flynn greets. “Didn’t think you would actually be back.”

Pettiness rears its ugly head. _Well, here I am._ “Morning,” he mutters.

The woman’s nametag reads _FRAZER_ , but she tells him “I’d rather you call me Chloe” when she shakes his hand.

“Sam,” he says by way of introduction. “You, uh, you tell people that so they’re not as nervous about you poking around in their brains?”

She smirks.

“Don’t mind him,” Flynn cuts in. “He’s had a shite few days.” He’s giving Sam that rueful smile again. 

Sam doesn’t thank him, turns to Chloe, and says, “I, uh, brought these.” He lifts the bag, winces at the mess of sounds it creates, and lowers it. Forcing himself to sound more sure, he asks, “You said I had forms to sign?”

Flynn signals for him to wait and rolls his chair to another desk filled with yet more papers. “Wow, you weren’t kidding about him,” Chloe remarks, assessing him openly.

Sam tenses. “What’s he said about me?”

“Only that you’re a Drake. I see the resemblance, once I look past the black eye.”

He remembers Elena mentioning that Nate knew a few people there, which makes him wonder just how many people knew about Rafe before he did. Was Flynn the one who printed out the card? Did some mailman read the card before dropping it into Nate and Elena’s mailbox and say to himself, _That poor bastard_? Did Rafe’s parents sift through their mail one morning and discover over a plate of eggs that their son finally moved on from that _terrible influence_?

“Can I just sign the forms, please?”

“Oh, try to lighten up a little,” Flynn says as he hands over a packet of papers. “I mean, I know this is pretty morbid in print, but in the end, you’ll be better off.”

_You’ll be happier_ , chimes a voice in his head, _you’ll stop beating yourself up over whose fault it was, you’ll move on. Take the damn papers._

He takes the papers. Chloe hands him a pen, her eyes lingering on him. Sam gets the feeling that she and Flynn discussed more than she let on, but he doesn’t ask—he doesn’t care what they think of him, he decides, and if he _does_ and he’s just lying to himself, he won’t remember this experience in the morning anyway.

Chloe takes his bags off to another room while he sits in the waiting room and fills out the form. It outlines the process, its effects, and the possible risks ( _no fatal harm but_ _may cause lasting physical discomfort for a 2-3 days after the treatment_ ), nothing groundbreaking that Flynn hasn’t already told him about. At the end of it all, it asks him to confirm that he consents to the procedure, and Sam signs his name before he does something else like walking out of that building entirely.

He hands the papers to Flynn when he’s finished, and Flynn gives him that strange smile again and leads him to the room where Chloe is setting up. “Is it going to get busier later on?” he asks, thinking of the empty waiting room and how he’s only seen the two of them around here.

“Maybe, maybe not. Too early to tell,” says Flynn. “Sit.” There’s a chair by a window, cushioned and angled back like a dentist’s chair but with a dome-like headgear attached to the top. He sits and leans back, fingers drumming tunelessly on the armrests. Chloe is bent over the computer to his right, and he tries to see what she’s doing until Flynn comes to his side with a clipboard and a small tape recorder. “We’ll do your interview here.”

“Flynn,” Chloe says warningly.

“Relax, I’ll be thorough.” He catches Flynn rolling his eyes as the other man pulls the headgear down. It fits snugly around Sam’s head, and Sam shivers. “He just wants to do this quick, don’t you, Samuel?”

“ _Sam_ ,” he says, irritated, and Flynn gives no indication he heard or has any plans to heed him, simply going on to announce today’s date into the recorder.

“The client has filled out the necessary forms and read and agreed to the terms and conditions of the procedures.” Flynn thumbs a button. “Are we good to go, Dr. Frazer?”

“Yes, everything’s set up, Dr. _Flynn_.”

“Ah, good try, but I’m no doctor.” Flynn turns back to him. “I’m going to start recording again—you just have to say your name, the name of the person you intend to erase, and why you’re erasing them.”

He holds the recorder near Sam’s mouth. _Click._

“My name is Samuel Drake. I’m here to erase R… Rafe Adler because he’s moved on, and I want to move on too.”

It sounds as scripted and stilted as it feels, but Flynn nods approvingly, and the rest of the interview unfolds in the same fashion. Flynn reads out loud a question — _do you consent to this procedure?,_ _is Mr. Adler aware that you are erasing him from your memory?, does Mr. Adler plan to undergo the same procedure?_ , _please describe your first memory with Mr. Adler_ — and Sam answers, stiff and semi-distracted by the title each time because Rafe hated being called that, hated sounding like his father — _yes, no,_ and _he already has._ It’s the last request gives him pause. “Why do you need to know that?”

Flynn blinks, looking up from his clipboard, and Sam realizes that the recorder is still going. “We’ll need an end-point for the procedure, since we start with fresher memories and work our way back,” Chloe says, finally glancing back from the computer. “Right now, we’re keeping track of your brain activity and what parts of your brain are affected by certain memories. Once we know what your brain looks like when you think about your earliest memory with R— Mr. Adler, we’ll know when we’ve reached the last memory to be deleted.”

“Usually, it’s the first time people meet each other.” Flynn shrugs. “But it’s whatever earliest memory you share with him.”

“We met each other properly around April last year, but we had run into each other before that. Fifteenth of March, I think it was. Yeah.” He hesitates, feeling surreal in that chair and in that room, but Flynn and Chloe are staring at him expectantly so he has to go on. “It was evening, around seven, and it was warm for March, I remember that. He was attending a dinner event at a hotel, and I happened to be passing by while he was going out for fresh air. We talked for a few minutes until he had to go back in, and that was that. We didn’t exactly introduce ourselves, but that was how we first met.”

Chloe cocks an eyebrow at him, as if expecting more, before turning to her computer and keying something in. Sam can see an image of something gray split in half—his brain, he realizes, with a few dots of blue and red that mean absolutely nothing to him.

When Chloe turns back to him, she says, “Why don’t you try imagining the memory instead,” too firmly to be a suggestion.

“I thought this was an interview.”

“It is, but you’re showing typical signs of someone who’s trying to not to think about what they’re saying, and considering _where_ we’re trying to look for patterns,” Chloe gestures to her own head, “that won’t do. Now go ahead and think of that memory you just described, and try not to leave out any details. It’s not like we can read your mind, hm?”

Of _course_ he’s embarrassed. He’s sitting there hooked up to some machine that can’t read his mind but can do something close to it, with two people he barely considers friends asking him to tell them about his private life.

“Sam.” A hand on his shoulder—Chloe’s. She’d moved over, and now she’s smiling down at him in a show of kindness. “It’s okay. Just focus.”

How fucking desperate he must be to hear it, that he actually _believes_ this near-stranger?

_Just focus_.

Where to begin? Their first memory. It was the fifteenth of March, he knows that definitely, because it was the

 

 

_“ides of March, did you know that?” he said, glancing sideways at the man who had come to a stop next to him. It wasn’t a fact that was particularly relevant to anything—Sam didn’t recognize the fountain statue to be a replica of something more famous—they had just been standing there in silence for about ten minutes now, and he figured he might as well break the ice._

_The other man was some inches shorter than him, eyebrows knitted downwards in a look of concentration. He turned to Sam when Sam spoke, but the deepening of his brow suggested that he had no idea what he was going on about._

_“The Ides of March,” Sam repeated, then. “The Romans, you know them, they didn’t number the days of the month like we do now. Instead they went off of three points for each month—the beginning, the middle, and the end. The Ides were the middle. It’s always either the thirteenth of fifteenth of the month, depending on when the full moon is.”_

_He raised a finger upwards, waiting for the other man to tilt his gaze up before looking up himself…to a cloudy, moon-less sky. “Ah, well,” he said, ignoring his own embarrassment by taking a drag from his cigarette, “the moon’s up there somewhere.”_

_The other man drew his gaze away from the sky in one lazy motion, a downtilt of his head that bared his profile and the exposed skin of his neck above a buttoned-up collar. The man wore a white suit as opposed to the darker colors that Sam saw other people wearing. He was attractive, Sam decided without much trouble, even with that slight pout to his lips. Or, possibly, because of it._

_The man said nothing but raised an eyebrow slightly, and Sam took it as a sign of interest, however meager._

_He began, “You might know the date better as the day J—”_

_The other man finished, “—Julius Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times and left to to die?”_

_Sam blinked._

_“Had a tutor with a birthday on this day. It was her favorite story to tell.”_

_“And let me guess, she retold it to you just ten minutes ago?”_

_“No. She was fired ten years ago when we caught her stealing from the house.”_

_Sam whistled lowly. “Maybe the stories were her way of warning you.”_

_The man smiled for the first time. “That’s what I always told my father.”_

_“He should have learned from Caesar.”_

_A full laugh this time—Sam took some pride in that. “Should have learned from Caesar.”_

_Sam felt the awkwardness clear from the air, making it a little easier to breathe. “If you knew that’s what I was building up to, you could’ve put me out of my misery sooner,” he commented._

_“I couldn’t. You actually looked interested in it.”_

_“Why else would I_ regale _you with the bloody story of someone’s death?”_

_“You wouldn’t believe the things that people have tried to turn into pick-up lines before,” was all the man said before looking behind him. “I should go. If you can sneak in, come find me.”_

_Sam hadn’t, though. He’d watched the man walk back into the hotel and then stood there in the courtyard a little while longer, smiling to himself, and when it got too cold, he had made his way to his motorcycle parked by the curb and driven back to the apartment._

_He stalled before going inside, though, waiting for the clouds to move so he could see the_

 

 

“That’s much better,” Chloe says, though it’s the sharp clicks of the keyboard and not her voice that brings him back to reality. Rafe always typed like that, fast and precise but with an unnecessary force, like he was perpetually angry at whoever or whatever was on the screen.

He becomes aware of Flynn moving away, trading in the clipboard and recorder for the bags. “Hope you’re all warmed up, mate,” he says cheerfully, dragging over a half table that stretches over Sam’s legs.

“We’ll need you to do the same thing for each object you see.”

Sam eyes the bags warily. “All of them?”

Chloe actually looks a little sympathetic. “It’s the best way to map out your memories of him.”

“…Fine.” He thinks of Flynn, _didn’t think you would actually be back_ , and Rafe, blissfully ignorant with someone else. It’s spite that keeps him in that chair. “Let’s just get it over with.”

He shouldn’t be surprised by the things they bring out, but each one gives him a little jolt anyway. He figures it’s because Flynn maintains no order whatsoever, seemingly grabbing whatever his hand first lands on, and one moment it’s a calendar with January torn out after a particularly nasty fight and in the next it’s the copy of _The Alchemist_ that he would always find Rafe reading on the couch. 

“Good. Next,” Chloe says after each one, though eventually all Sam needs to listen for is the particularly hard jab of the _enter_ key to know that Flynn will be replacing the object in front of him.

A pair of old tickets: _A rainy afternoon, Rafe shaking raindrops from his hair and turning to Sam, bright-eyed, “_ Pirates of Penzance _, Friday night. Think you can clear your schedule?”_

A postcard with a peeling stamp in the corner but otherwise unsent: _A hotel room in Brazil,_ _both of them a little tipsy, the back of it filled with his handwriting telling Nathan they_ should come to Brazil right now, it’s beautiful here, _and Rafe’s sloppy addendum in the corner,_ Send Ms. Elena and Ms. Cassie, you can stay there _._

A snow globe: _A mild Monday morning, the lively sound of the flea market, Rafe taking an interest in something for once, “Huh, they skate around if you wind it up,” five dollars well spent._

An atlas, frayed at many corners: _Nights, usually in a post-coital haze, the muscles of Rafe’s back rippling as he tugs the book over and tells Sam he thought of somewhere else they could go, red pens underlining and circling city names for good measure._

He’s drained and maybe a little nauseous by the time Flynn pulls out the last object, a scrap of notebook paper with the phone number of a travel agency and an uncertain _Scotland?_ written next to it, and exhales in relief when he finishes the memory and Flynn puts it away.

“Good?” he asks without bothering to mask how tired he is, and Chloe nods.

“More than good.” She smiles when she turns to him, the computer screen littered with bright greens and reds and yellows behind her. “This is your last chance to back out.”

“I can still do that?”

“The equipment will be a pain in the arse to shut down,” says Flynn, “but yes, you can.”

“Don’t listen to him.” It’s Chloe’s turn to roll her eyes. “It’s fine if you do. I’ll still have a good portion of my Friday left over.”

“No. I’m not backing out.” He’s surprised at how confident his own voice sounds.

“As you wish. Flynn, prep the anesthesia. I hope you’re not afraid of needles.”

Flynn disappears somewhere to the side — Sam can’t look with the apparatus around his head — and Chloe comes to the side of his chair. A few seconds later, he feels it begin to tip backwards. “For your comfort,” Chloe explains. “We’ll probably be here for a few hours.”

He’s never been afraid of needles, but he thinks he feels a flare of apprehension when Flynn finally administers the dose on him. _Too late for that, don’t you think?_ he says to himself. “How many people change their minds when you ask them?” he asks out loud.

“Most of them,” Chloe replies without missing a beat. “Flynn, the lights?”

“I got it, I got it.”

The room dims, or maybe it’s his vision as the anesthesia kicks in.

“Relax,” is the last thing he hears, “it’s just like going to sleep,” Chloe’s voice becoming distant, distant, until he wonders

 

 

(“He’s out?” Flynn makes his way back over to their client’s side, stepping on one of the empty bags by accident. He curses, lifts a foot over it.

Chloe hums. “Like a light.”

“Great. You’re starting?”

“In a second. Come here first—does this remind you of anything?” 

She tilts the computer screen towards him, and Flynn peers at the scan of their client’s brain, lit up in pinks and reds and yellows. He chuckles when he recognizes the pattern. “Why, yes, that’s the classic smattering of love-at-first-sight. Did you get that while he was thinking about their first meeting?”

“I did.” Chloe shakes her head as she switches the screen to a live view of their client’s brain activity. “A little sad, isn’t it?” she muses.

Flynn whistles agreeably, glancing down at Samuel Drake’s face, which looks almost peaceful in this state. “Poor bastard.”)

 

 

how many people does take to do the operation? It sounds like the start of a joke. 

“Samuel,” Flynn greets. “Didn’t think you would actually be back.”

“Morning,” he says in return, looking at Dr. Frazer.

_Frazer._ _How do I know that?_

She’s wearing a name tag that readers _FRAZER_ , that’s how, but then she opens her mouth to speak and Sam says at the same time she does, “I’d rather you call me Chloe.”

“Do you tell people that so they’re not as nervous about you poking around their brains?” he asks, the words coming to him like a memory resurfacing—

_Oh. The procedure._

The realization comes slowly, as slowly as he notices the details, or lack thereof, that this isn’t reality: The shelf full of blurry book spines, illegible titles of the magazines on the table that he never took time to inspect, the thick cloud of darkness obscuring the hallway he has yet to walk through.

_This is it, then?_

It doesn’t feel…like anything, really. With this setting, washed out and slightly muffled, it’s rather underwhelming.

The memory, he finds, plays on even without his participation; Flynn hands over a packet of forms and doesn’t blink when they simply flutter to the floor, just like Chloe hands a pen to no one before walking off into the darkness.

He listens to Flynn’s one-sided conversation and follows him down the hall where the darkness parts for them. He watches Flynn and Chloe set up the procedure in blurry movements, their voices becoming garbled. It’s strange; he doesn’t remember every single thing he said that morning, yet responses come to his mind, quick and clear as day, at all the right moments.

“I’m going to start recording again…”

This response he says out loud: “My name is Samuel Drake. I’m here to erase Rafe Adler.” He ends up trailing off, but the memory of Flynn writes something on his blank clipboard and continues with the next questions.

He wants to look away when Flynn begins pulling things out of the bags, but he hears something that keeps his eyes riveted on the scene—the sound of things being tossed carelessly back into a separate bag. He doesn’t remember hearing it — he must have been too focused on the memories — but the sounds evidently still registered in his memory. “Hey,” he says as Flynn drops the atlas into the bag without a care for the snow globe already in there, “be a little more careful with those.”

Of course, it’s too late now, so Flynn proceeds to nudge the bag aside with a foot, almost spilling its contents.

“Asshole,” Sam says as Flynn prepares the anesthesia.

The scene seems to flicker and Sam’s attention lands on the bag. He kneels beside it with a frown and, hoping that nothing is broken, reaches inside and

 

 

gently eases the contents of the box into the black trash bag. The wine bottle label flutters out, as if trying to escape, and Sam presses his lips into a tight line and places the label in the bag. His hands itch for a cigarette, but he ignores the urge, stands up with the bag in hand, and makes his way over to the stereo first. He takes Rafe’s cassettes out and puts them in the bag to be joined by others: A small carving of a bird from Madagascar, a snow globe from a local market.

He can feel himself shaking as he moves into the next room and

 

 

barely manages to sidestep Vicky on his way to the stool. “Saw who?” Elena is asking, and, oh, there’s that tightness in his chest again. He follows through the motions and the words, wondering why it still feels so painful even though it’s a memory. _That’s not fair. Why do I have to feel it twice?_

This one is sharper than the others, the light too bright overhead and everything frighteningly focused on that kitchen. The rest of the house seems two-dimensional and static, unreal.

“I’m sorry I exploded on you,” Sam tells his memory of his brother. “I wish you’d told me, but I get it now. You were lookin’ out for me.”

He watches Nate tell them to wait while he puts Cassie to bed, watches Elena bring the paper out anyway. “I’m sorry,” she’s saying, and the rest of her words become faraway. 

The paper looks almost golden under this lighting, and Sam thinks _golden ticket_ again, _congratulations, you’ve won!_ Won what—some peace of mind, maybe. It _did_ eliminate the uncertainty, didn’t it? Now he knows exactly where he and Rafe stand, and he no longer has to keep checking his phone or his email or his answering machine or _hope_. 

One of Rafe’s books used to say, _Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man._ Maybe someone broke up with Nietzsche too.

There’s a darkness that begins to grow, first only along the edges and then bleeding into the scene, building thicker and climbing higher up the walls, up his legs. He blinks, and the kitchen disappears; he blinks, and Nate and Elena are gone.

He walks through a door that isn’t really there and finds himself outside, feeling weightless or lost or maybe both.

_The paper_ , he remembers on cue, _I forgot the paper_ , and he turns

 

 

and watches the man crumple to the ground, a hand to his face, and Sam recoils in disgust when he sees that the man has no features, just flesh pulled taut over his face. “What the _hell_?” comes a voice, and Sam remembers _Rafe_ and turns and catches his fist before it lands against his face.

“Rafe,” he holds fast with one hand, grabbing Rafe’s shoulder with the other, “I had to do this, you understand? You took someone else to our place, and I— I got mad, okay? I’m _still_ pissed.”

Rafe manages to wrench himself out of Sam’s grip, a little wide-eyed and staring at him with more fear than anger. “I don’t know who you are, but stay the hell away from us,” he hisses, reaching down to help the faceless man up.

“See, that’s why I’m doing this, too,” Sam calls after them as they walk away, words tumbling out with an ease that they didn’t have before. “You erased me, Rafe, so I’m erasing you.”

Rafe casts him a single backwards glance. (Did he do that before? Did he look back?)

“You erased me first, Rafe! You fucking erased me.” His voice cracks, and a laugh catchesin the back of his throat and comes out a small, strained sound. “You erased me and every second we spent together, and you didn’t even have the decency to tell me. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Spots in the sky begin to flicker off like lights in a supermarket about to close, and suddenly the park is devoid of people except for him and Rafe in the distance, getting farther and farther away.

 

 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he whispers, voice hoarse from disuse.

“Tell you what?” Rafe says, barely glancing at him as he crosses the room for a glass of water. Sam feels his jaw tighten at Rafe’s unconcerned attitude, as if all six clocks aren’t shouting _it’s three in the morning_ and Sam hasn’t felt a moment of peace since snow began falling and Rafe stopped answering his texts.

“Where you’ve _been_ ,” Sam says.

“I’m a grown man, Samuel.” There’s a pause as Rafe opens the fridge, followed by an annoyed sigh when he doesn’t seem to find what he’s looking for and makes his way to Sam instead. “I don’t need to check in with you every time I go out. You’re not my mother, remember?” Sam wonders if Rafe purposely sharpens his words when he gets like this or if they naturally come out that way.

“So me worrying about where the hell you disappear to until three in the morning makes me your mother?” He refuses to react when Rafe straddles him on the couch, his hands roaming up Sam’s chest, eyes glinting in the moonlight.

Rafe hums and leans in, pressing coquettish kisses along Sam’s temple and down the side of his face with a softness that contrasts with his fist bunching up the front of Sam’s shirt. “Yes,” he answers into Sam’s neck. “It’s irritating.”

Sam pushes him away then, feeling his _own_ spike of irritation, and Rafe actually looks surprised when he’s almost knocked off of the couch. 

Sam thinks, _Your cheeks were red from the cold and there were snowflakes still melting in your hair._

_This is the last time I saw you._

“I’m not in the mood, Rafe,” he mutters, trying to push him aside—and he hates that even when he’s pissed he’s still careful around Rafe, an act of decency that he wonders if Rafe ever considers returning, because here he is now, shoes knocking against Sam’s knees as he willingly moves off of Sam.

“ _Not in the mood_ ,” he echoes, purposely dragging his syllables together in a show of mockery. “And you say _I’m_ dramatic.”

“There was a snowstorm outside, you were gone for eight hours, and you weren’t answering my calls or my texts,” Sam lists off through gritted teeth, “I think this is a perfectly justified reaction.”

“Oh, please.” Rafe scoffs, splaying himself over the newly-freed space on the couch and hitching his legs over the armrest. “Why don’t you ask me what you really want to know?”

Sam shakes his head disbelievingly. He can’t bear to look at Rafe, but of course, he rises to the taunt regardless. Doesn’t he always? “What is it, Rafe? What do I _really_ want to know, since you apparently know me so well?”

“You want to know if I’ve been fucking someone,” Rafe says without flinching. He smiles and tilts his head away from Sam, as if inviting him to search for marks that someone else might have left on his skin. “You want to know if I’ve been at ‘one of my parties,’ fucking someone who’s richer and younger than you. Or maybe I’m letting them fuck me— How long did you say you waited? Eight hours? I’m sure you thought of a lot of things in that time—you've always had the better imagination.”

Sam shuts his eyes, trying to ignore the ringing in his ears that progressively becoming louder, louder. “Who is he?”

Rafe laughs. “Who says it has to be a _he_?” he returns easily, swinging his legs over to sit up and then stand, and Sam sees _red_.

“I said, _who is he?”_ Rafe must have been reaching for him, because Sam meets him halfway, fingers closing around Rafe’s wrist and keeping him in place. _You don’t get to evade this one,_ he thinks on cue, and all of the anger and hurt still feels so real that this doesn’t feel like a memory at all. _Not when you brought it up first._

“Let go of me.”

“Answer me.”

“I said let go.”

“ _Answer me._ ”

And Rafe finally pushes in closes instead of trying to pull away and shouts, “No one, Sam!” His gleeful expression has slipped off, replaced by something more raw and _hurt_ , and Sam finds himself thinking again _what could_ you _possibly be hurt about?_ even though he does know. He’s been here before, he knows what Rafe’s going to say and how his voice is going to tremble when he says it: “Jesus, you think I’ve actually been with anyone else?”

Sam bites his lip so hard he fears he draws blood, but that’s no use, isn’t it—this has already happened, and his mind knows his cue: _Yes, because that’s what you_ do _when you’re not getting enough attention, Rafe, you get it from somebody else._

The words are cruel, _meant_ to be hurt as he’d been hurt, and even Rafe can’t put up a front fast enough. For a one fleeting, terrifying moment, _betrayal_ lacerates Rafe’s face—and then it’s gone, smoothed out with blankness, and Sam remembers viciously thinking, _No, you don’t get to retreat this time._

“You're upset that Scotland fell through,” he continues out loud. He’s reciting the words simply and devoid of intent, an echo of past too late to take back. _That’s why you’ve been acting like this,_ he’s supposed to say next, but he _can’t_ , not when he knows what Rafe will go on to do once he’s walked out of that door. 

“Is this where it starts?” he asks instead, voice soft. “Is this where you start to want to forget me?”

Rafe looks down, looks to anywhere but Sam. Overhead, the light whines, flickers, and in a blink, the furniture is gone. “Yes,” Rafe whispers, off-script now too, “but not for the reason you think.”

“Then why?” Another blink, and the walls are gone and they are standing in nothing. “I’m sorry,” Sam says, desperate to say what he couldn’t say before, but then Rafe is gone in the next blink and he’s alone, still calling into the dark, “Rafe, whatever I did, I wish I c—”

 

 

(“Another one down,” Chloe hums, waiting for the screen to update itself.

“That looked like a particularly nasty one,” Flynn says through a mouthful of rice. He’s leaned casually against her desk, a box of takeout in hand. The one he’d bought for her sits untouched on the other side of the computer; she’s been doing this for as long as Flynn has, perhaps even longer, but she doesn’t know how Flynn has been so desensitized so much sooner.

“This one’s got a lot of particularly nasty ones,” she allows, starting on the next memory. “Go eat in the break room. I don’t want you getting food on the equipment again.”

Flynn grumbles something and pushes off the desk but makes no actual move to leave the room. Chloe ignores him and sets another memory for deletion.

Someone knocks loudly on the door.

She startles, hand jerking and accidentally knocking the mouse off the desk. It lands on the floor with enough force to knock the panel and the battery out. “Shit,” she exclaims, automatically reaching for it while trying to see who’s standing in the open doorway.

“Sorry,” says the intruder. Chloe recognizes him as one of the newer doctors. Fausse, she thinks his name is. Something foreign like that. She had worked with him on his first case—at the memory, she winces, glancing at Samuel Drake. 

“Did you forget that we were closed today?” Flynn asks, still working away on his food.

“I came to grab something I forgot. I didn’t think anyone would be here.” 

“Aren’t you supposed to be wining and dining your new boyfriend?”

“I’m getting there. He suddenly decided he wanted to go somewhere out of the country. I just finished talking him out of booking a flight on the spot.” Fausse turns then, revealing an splotch of purple that spans a good part of his right cheek, and Flynn seems to notice at the same time Chloe does.

“Je- _sus_ , mate, what happened to you?” Flynn laughs. “Did your boyfriend kick up a fuss when he saw that?” 

“Actually, my boyfriend was _there_ when the asshole punched me,” Fausse huffs, beginning to root through the drawers. “He was the one who punched him back.”

“Well, I guess everyone’s just getting into brawls these days,” Flynn says, shrugging.

“What do you mean?”

“Take a look at our latest client here.”

Chloe is ready it as insignificant chatter until she hears Fausse say, “Shit, that’s _him_ , that’s the guy that punched me,” and she spins around in her chair to see Fausse looking at Samuel Drake so quickly that the mouse almost flies off the desk again. Suddenly, the matching bruises make sense. 

“You know him?” she asks, incredulous.

“I don’t _know_ know him, but I know he’s the guy who punched me in the face while I was out with R— My boyfriend.” There’s a telltale moment in which Fausse _realizes_ something, and when he accidentally locks eyes with Chloe he begins to backpedal, “I think I’m going to go look around the front desk, I think I might h—”

“Fausse,” Chloe say slowly, meaningfully, “does your _boyfriend_ happen to be Rafe Adler, who was your bloody _patient_ just a week ago?”)

 

 

_“Sam.”_

_The smell of coffee, the warmth of someone’s lips pressing into the back of his neck._

_“Sam. Why’d you leave the curtains open?”_

_“Mm.” Sam opened his eyes, then pinched them shut again when sunlight flooded his vision too fast. “Sorry. Shit.”_

_A small laugh, Rafe’s breath warm over his neck. “You deserve this one.”_

_“What do I deserve?” Eyes still closed, he shifted so his back was to the window, and when he opened his eyes again there was Rafe, propping his head up with a hand and holding a steaming mug of coffee with the other. “Hm?”_

_Rafe smiled, leaning down to kiss him, and Sam tasted coffee, sweet. “To wake up horribly,” Rafe answered, probably referring to the merciless sunlight, but now it’s not so bad when Sam’s facing him._

_“It’s not that horrible,” Sam said, reaching up to smooth strands of Rafe’s hair from his face,_ and he remembers this now, remembers how relieved he felt to wake up to the smell of Rafe’s coffee. “You’re still here,” he marvels. They’re laying in bed, surrounded by an endless stretch of white, white, white.

Rafe lifts an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

Sam lets his hand linger over Rafe’s cheek, watching Rafe’s eyes flutter as he leans into the contact. He should have done that more often, he thinks. “I’m erasing you from my memory, but you’re still here. For now.”

“Oh.” Rafe’s eyebrows furrow slightly as he takes a sip of coffee. “Why are you erasing me?” He sounds oddly peaceful, but Sam remembers that this morning as a whole was oddly peaceful, like the calm before that night’s storm. In a few minutes, Sam is going to say something to set Rafe off, Rafe is going to storm out, and it will be hours before Sam sees him again (and after that, weeks).

“Because you did it to me first.”

Rafe shifts back to lean against the headboard, mug cradled between two hands, pensive. “That sounds like something I would do.”

“So you already know what it is.”

“ ‘course. My parents have been big investors from the beginning.”

He watches the rise and fall of Rafe’s chest, follows the line of his profile from the curve of his lips to the bridge of his nose. “You never told me that.”

“I don’t tell you a lot of things,” Rafe says with a sardonic smile, and Sam’s struck by the present tense. _Right_ , he remembers, _we’re still together here. He can still stand to be in the same room as me._ “It’s part of my backup plan too.” Rafe pauses before amending, “Plans. I have a lot of them.”

“In case of what?”

“In case of a lot of things.” Another pause. “I think of a lot of things that involve you, and all of them can go wrong in a lot of ways. A lot of them already have.”

“Like Scotland?”

“Among other things.”

He quiets at the memory, feeling suddenly as if he really is in this moment, remembering “yesterday” as if it really did happen just the day before. He leans in until his lips brush against Rafe’s bare shoulder and there, he whispers a question.

“Do you want to hear something absolutely crazy?” Rafe asks instead of answering it.

“Go for it.”

Rafe smiles, and the bed creaks as he angles his body towards Sam, creating a small, intimate space between them where he can confide, eyes earnest, “I still want to.”

In the next moment, he’s vanished, and Sam is curled towards an empty space on the bed, the sheets cold like there never once was anyone there. “This is what I want,” he says, resting back on the pillow. He tells the darkening ceiling over and over, “This is what I want. This is what I

 

 

want, Sam?”

“Uh, I— Whatever I usually get.” He lowers his menu slightly, watching for Rafe’s reaction; sure enough, he sees Rafe put his own menu down to look back at him, unimpressed.

“Really, Samuel.”

“What? I _like_ what I usually get,” he defends. He waits for the usual sarcastic response, but Rafe only chuckles and goes back to lining the pack of chopsticks parallel with his spoon and fork. He always had little compulsions like that. 

Sam smiles too; he hides it behind his menu. He likes this memory.

He remembers how Rafe had been acting like that for days—at first tensing at something (the loud construction going on outside of their apartment, an occasional untimely work call, one of Sam’s jibes coming out the wrong way), then ultimately diffusing himself (a relaxation of his shoulders, an almost-inaudible exhale, a small smile). “Hey,” he says, reaching across the table for Rafe’s hand.

Rafe looks surprised at the contact, but he doesn’t pull away, and so they sit like that while they wait for a server, Rafe’s utensils neatly lined on one side of the table and Sam’s still cluttered on the other. 

Sam wishes they had done this more often too: Simply sitting together in silence.

“Are you okay?” he finally asks.

Rafe tilts his head. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

A loud _crash_ interrupts his response. Sam instinctively looks around for the source of the noise, only to notice that no one else seems to have heard; the other patrons with their blurry faces and blurry tables continue to chat in garbled voices, and even Rafe looks undisturbed.

“I don’t know,” Sam says, easing back into his seat.

(“He suddenly decided he wanted to go somewhere out of the country. I had to talk him out of booking a flight on the spot.”)

He looks up at the sound of a voice, bewildered. _Scotland?_ The paper lanterns twirl lazily from the ceiling, unanswering.

(“Shit, that’s him, that’s the guy that punched me.”)

_It’s coming from up there,_ he thinks with more conviction. The voices echo from above, like sounds from reality bleeding into a dream. He recognizes the second one as Chloe’s but the first didn’t sound like Flynn, which only deepens his confusion. _Did they not give me enough anesthesia?_ is his initial, ridiculous thought.

“Do you hear that?” he asks Rafe.

“Hear what?” Rafe asks in return, craning his head to listen as well, but there’s only tinny music playing from the restaurant’s speakers and chatter between other customers. “Were you saying something else?”

Sam would have found it difficult to remember the right answer hadn’t already come to mind: “I was just thinking that you haven’t been as stressed about the trip as I thought you would be.”

“The _trip_ ,” Rafe says with easy confidence, “is going to be fine. All the preparations are done.”

(“Fausse.”)

He shifts, uncomfortable now that the thought about _not enough anesthesia_ actually looks probable, but trying to maintain his conversation with Rafe, “Is that why you’ve been smiling so much?”

“No. There’s just something I’ve been meaning to show you.” 

(“Does your boyfriend happen to be Rafe Adler, who was just your bloody patient one week ago?”)

“ _What?_ ”

Rafe stands up, mistaking his outburst for a genuine question. “Come on.”

“Wait,” he says, and he strains to listen for more as Rafe tugs him out of the booth and towards the door.

A quick glance down shows that plates of food have appeared on the table, most of them eaten from, and Rafe’s utensils are no longer lined along the placemat but closed politely over his plate. The completed check sits at the edge of the table, a twenty-dollar tip tucked underneath.

He lets Rafe cover his eyes and lead him out of the restaurant. He knows it’s impossible to go from the restaurant to the park in three steps, but that’s how long it takes until Rafe is withdrawing his hands and Sam is blinking his eyes open to a clear blue sky, a smooth sheet of ice, and a golden plaque gleaming under the sun, and suddenly he forgets everything except this.

_The Golden Hind_ , it says. 

_A lazy conversation in bed,_ he remembers, _Rafe asking if he could bring back anyone from the dead to have dinner with, who would it be, and him answering with Sir Francis Drake. Rafe eyeing him amusedly but curiously, prodding him for an explanation. Sam eventually laughing and relenting, launching into the kinds of stories he loved reading as a kid._

He has mulled over this memory too many times to count, but to _relive_ it is an entirely different matter. This scene is crisp and vibrantly colored, as if impressed very vividly into his memories.

Maybe it is: _It was windy but sunny that day. Rafe woke me up at five in the morning, and we spent the whole morning and a good part of the afternoon walking around in the city—he insisted on the walking part. We ate at a Chinese restaurant for lunch, and afterwards he asked if I trusted him. I told him that I did. He covered my eyes, and we walked all the way from the restaurant to the park. He led me here._

“It took some convincing,” Rafe says, coming up beside him and lacing their hands together, “but as soon as I told them I’d cover the reparations plus a little extra, they were _very_ willing to do it.”

Sam feels just as speechless as before. 

“It’s not _exactly_ like a frozen pond, but this one’s ours. Well, _mine_ in name,” Rafe bites his lips and turns to him, and Sam looks back, feeling a sudden sting in his eyes, “but ours in every other sense.”

History says that he stood there, stunned into silence, until Rafe became worried and asked _is this okay?_

He decides _fuck history_ and pulls Rafe in and kisses him before doubt clouds his expression, and into that kiss he whispers, “I love it, thank you, I love it, I love you,” a series of declarations that surprises him for how _sincere_  it feels.

He pulls away to lean their foreheads together, stilling the tremors in Rafe’s hands and waiting for Rafe to open his eyes, simultaneously bright and happy and _afraid_ , and to whisper a single question.

And then Rafe is gone and so is the rink and so are the trees, the ground beneath his feet and the sun above, and he’s back in Lacuna, Inc., handing his and Rafe’s menus to the waiter and watching her leave down the hall.

(“What did you come here for?” Chloe says, standing up now. “Flynn. Go check our files _now_.”)

“It’s fine if you do,” says Chloe next to him, slowly easing his chair into a reclining position. “I’ll still have a good portion of my Friday left over.”

Dazed, he opens his mouth. Hesitates. 

(“Half his bloody box is empty, Chloe, holy _shit._ ”

“Really? _Really?_ ” Chloe’s voice kicks up in volume. “What the _hell_ have you been doing with Adler?”)

“As you wish,” Chloe continues in his silence. “Flynn, the anesthesia?”

“Hold on,” Sam manages. “What’s happening?”

Chloe gives him a trying smile. “I hope you’re not afraid of needles.”

“Did something happen with Rafe?”

“I’m glad we’re finally communicating,” Rafe snarls, yanking his jacket back on and grabbing the keys from the computer desk. He walks right by Flynn, who is turning around with the anesthesia. “Have a nice life, Sam.”

He starts for the doorway and the nothingness beyond it, and Sam desperately calls after him, “Rafe, wait, _don’t_ , you’ll dis—”

 

 

(“You’re not leaving until you explain,” Chloe says plainly.

“You can’t keep me in here,” Fausse protests.

“Try me.”

“C’mon, mate,” Harry sighs, pushing a hand through his hair in agitation. He’s close enough to the door to catch Fauss if he tries to make a run for it, but he _really_ doesn’t want to. When he offered this to Sam, he expected to be able to do it quick, get it off his conscience, and here they are instead. “Don’t be any shittier than you’ve already been.”

“I— Fine, I took his stuff. I wanted to learn more about him. There. Happy?”

“No, you don’t take _people’s memories_ just to learn more about them. What w— Oh, my God.” Chloe stops, a mixture of realization and horror twisting her face as she remembers Rafe Adler, _tense and jittery, sitting in the waiting room with a modest box of things—a calling card for a Chinese restaurant, a letter from the community thanking him for his gracious donation, a small box—_ )

 

 

“Huh,” Rafe says, turning the snow globe in his hand, “they skate around if you wind it up.” He lifts it to his face and looks at Sam, his face fisheye-ing around the glass. “Is this what your house looked like?”

“We have to go.”

“Sure, just let me—”

“No, we have to go _now._ ” Sam grabs his hand and pulls him away from the stall, back into the thick crowd of people. He starts one way, only to stop when he sees a familiar sign advertising hand-drawn caricatures.

_“Hey,” he said, already beginning to grin, “let’s get one of us, c’mon.”_

_Rafe made an impatient noise. “No. You know they always make me shorter than I really am.”_

_Sam laughed and tugged him along anyway._

“Not that way,” Sam mutters, looking around for someplace else.

“Mind telling me what we’re doing?”

“We have to go somewhere we haven’t gone before.”

“Oh, okay. What about prison?”

Sam looks at him strangely, and he realizes Rafe is still holding the snow globe.

“I paid for it when you weren’t looking,” he says, which isn’t _false_ — he did pay for it, just in another reality — and Rafe’s look of concern melts away as he laughs.

They reach the edges of the fair, where the crowd is thinner and it’s easier to elbow through to the parking lot. Rafe’s continues to laugh in earnest, apparently not paying attention because when Sam stops them by some traffic cones, Rafe bumps into his back.

“Sorry,” Sam murmurs, bringing a hand to cup the side of Rafe’s face. Everything still seems clear for now, so a moment's pause seems all right. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.” Rafe’s laughter has died down, but the flush remains in his cheeks and he looks so… _loose_ , so happy. This was a good day, Sam remembers. 

(“I couldn’t help it,” says the unfamiliar voice, sounding hapless but not nearly apologetic enough. “He just looked…beautiful, you know?”)

_You prick_ , Sam thinks, slow and seething like his rage. _I should have punched you harder._

("Do you not hear how  _sick_ you sound right now?")

“The parking lot? Didn’t you want to go somewhere we haven’t gone before?” Rafe looks up at Sam, amused.

“Sort of.” He can still hear vendors shouting out their sale prices in the distance, can see people arguing in front of stalls, can smell the thick scent of barbecue wafting through the air. _This is_ my _memory,_ he thinks. _Our memories. Ours._ “It’s…complicated.”

“Okay?” Rafe raises an eyebrow, clearly waiting for an explanation, but there’s no time—in the distance, the sky is beginning to black out, the darkness drawing closer and closer.

He has to stop this somehow, get Chloe or Flynn's attention—

“Chloe,” he shouts at the sky. He feels like an idiot as soon as he does it, but he can’t see any other way. “ _Flynn!_ I change my mind!” 

“Who are you _talking_ to?” Rafe asks, exasperated.

“Can you hear me? Flynn! Make it stop! I don't w—” He breaks into a small coughing fit when his throat can no longer take the strain, and that’s when he feels Rafe grab him firmly by the arm.

“All right,” Rafe eases him away from the cars, which is probably a good idea because Sam's considering setting off all of their alarms, “you’re going to hurt yourself if you keep doing that, come on.”

“You don’t understand,” he says.

“Only because you’re not _telling_ me,” Rafe snaps, and Sam thinks, _Oh._ When was the last time he heard that from either of them? Rafe is looking at him, confusion and worry etched openly across his features, and Sam realizes _right, he's from a time when we actually made an effort to_ talk  _to each other_ _._

He forces himself to say, “I think someone’s using our memories to make you fall in love with him,” and it takes more of him than he expects. Maybe it has to do with the fact that Rafe is still holding the snow globe, and it makes Sam wonder  _What did you take with you when you had me erased?_  and  _Which ones is he using?_

He’s not surprised when Rafe only looks more confused — it _does_ sound absurd out loud. “That’s ridiculous,” Rafe huffs.

“Exactly. He’s an asshole, and I have to stop him because—” _Because?_

Rafe makes a disagreeing noise and shakes his head. “No, it’s ridiculous because I’m not in love with those memories, I’m in love with _you_.”

This isn't the right time to be having this conversation, Sam thinks faintly. “So when you _stopped_ being in love with me, why did you have to erase them?” There’s a tightness in his chest, and it’s not from the shouting. “If you hadn't done that, we wouldn't be here. That guy wouldn't have anything to use—hell, you would have never met him."

Rafe's eyes flash at the accusation. "So this is my fault now?"

"You  _erased_ us, Rafe. If you were in love with me, how could you just make it go away like that?"

"I _don't know!_ I don't  _know_ , I don't know what you want me to tell you, Sam— I don't feel like that yet, I’m not _not_ in love with you yet.”

_ Yet. _

The darkness has reached the market now, and there’s a moment in which its richly-lit stalls seem to glow brighter in protest—only for all of the lights to fizzle out simultaneously as the stalls are swallowed up.

_ What am I doing? What do I _  think _I'm doing?_

Assuming he can take Rafe somewhere he can't be erased, what good is that going to do? How will it stop what's happening in reality?

_ It won't do anything at all. You know that. You're just selfish, and you want to keep this version of him when you couldn't keep the one you had in real life. _

He catches Rafe staring in the direction of the market, but if he’s worried, it doesn’t show. He seems to be staring past the market, past the dark, somewhere Sam can't follow. “Is that you erasing me too?” he asks, voice surprisingly tranquil.

Sam nods once. His own voice sounds rough after all of the shouting: “It is.” He doesn’t want to use the excuse of _you did it to me first_ ; it sounds childish now.

“So why do you have to stop him if you’re going to forget me anyway?"

“Because you deserve better than him.”

Rafe seems to return from wherever he's gone, his gaze floating back to Sam. “Who are you to decide what I deserve?”

Sam smiles bitterly. “Someone who knows firsthand what you didn’t.”

The first row of cars is gone.

“Do you think it's going to get us?”

Easy. “I don’t know.”

The second.

“You have to take me somewhere else.”

“What?”

“I said, take me somewhere else.” Determination settles over Rafe's features, smoothing out any last traces of distraction. "Take me to another memory.”

“Great idea, except I don’t know how to do that.”

The third row of cars disappears, leaving nothing between them and a vast wall of black.

“ _Think_ of somewhere else, I don’t know, just— try _some_ thing.” 

“All _right_ , I’m trying—”

“You have to try harder.”

"I  _am._ "

"It's almost here, you have to—"

“I said, I’m—”

 

 

about to lose an eardrum,” he whispers to Rafe, much to the disdain of the other theatergoers around them.

_Rafe shushed him, but his eyes were mirthful. Sam’s only consolation was a squeeze of his hand._

“It worked,” Rafe marvels—his voice is barely audible over the singing onstage, but loud enough to draw the ire of the people around them. Someone shushes him.

Sam isn’t too concerned. He looks down at himself ( _clad in a formal black suit for the occasion, though he had forgone the bowtie, to Rafe’s chagrin_ ) and at Rafe ( _fitted in a black suit of his own, a matching long coat folded over his lap_ ), not sure what he’s expecting to see, but they’re whole, unharmed. “This won’t work though,” he says, looking around. “I had the tickets with me, shit, I showed them this memory. They know about this.”

Rafe groans, sitting up now too. “Then why did you take us here?”

“It was the first place I thought of, okay, and your shouting wasn’t helping.”

“I was _not_ shouting.”

“You’re shouting right now.”

“I’m _not._ ” Rafe stops, seeming to realize he _is_ whisper-shouting, and crosses his arms. “Take us somewhere they don’t know about, then.”

“They know about all of my memories with you.”

“Then somewhere without me in it. Look.” Rafe gestures somewhere over his shoulder, and when Sam looks, he realizes that a third of the theater is gone.

“I don’t know— It’s hard to think of a time without you.”

He’s unaware that it slips out until he sees Rafe’s expression soften. “That’s…sweet.”

Sam refuses to acknowledge the sudden warmth rising in his cheeks. “Just hold on,” he mutters. “I’m thinking.”

_Nathan_ is the first thing that comes to mind, though it’s quickly followed by _the promise of good food and a_ puppy, come on, Rafe, how could you say no to that? _that finally convinced Rafe to come to the Drake-Fisher household for dinner_

—no, an earlier time—

 

 

_Nathan meeting Rafe for the first time, both of them frigidly staring the other down until Sam cleared his throat_

—no, it can't have Rafe, somewhere even earlier—

 

 

_the faint smell of pancakes in the air, the cool plastic of a miniature car in his hand as he moved it along_ the carpet, frowning when it becomes stuck before it even makes it across his makeshift road.

“Sam?” Rafe is sitting cross-legged in front of him, wearing a plum purple sweater lined with silhouettes of flying birds. “This is the ugliest thing I’ve ever worn,” he remarks dryly, picking at the cotton sleeve.

This looks early, Sam thinks, but if they are where he thinks they are, then this memory has absolutely nothing to do with Rafe and it might work.

“That’s not yours." He looks around, taking in the tall bookcases whose shelves seem to curve under the weight of books, the various maps pinned on the walls, the ship-in-a-bottle sitting on top of a fireplace. “That’s…a present I picked out for a friend. This is two days after Christmas,” he murmurs, slowly remembering now. “God, I was so proud of myself. When he came over and I saw he was wearing it, I thought I’d finally made a best friend, but then…”

The rest of the scene settles into place: The front door with the frayed welcome mat, the archaic-looking television, the staircase leading to his old room upstairs, the room he shared with Nathan—

—Nathan, decades younger but _Nathan_ , rushing in from another room with a plate in his hands. He folds himself on the floor between Sam and the front of the couch, empty plate clutched protectively to his chest. “Mom and Dad are fighting again,” he whispers, pressing himself into Sam’s side.

“Ah, I bet Dad will storm out like always, don’t worry.” The words come naturally as he ruffles his younger brother’s hair—dark brown, like his. Like their mother’s. “Then we’ll go in there and eat pancakes with Mom, yeah? She made strawberry ones ‘specially for you.”

“Not hungry,” Nathan mumbles. 

“What? But they’re your favorite.”

“I think Dad’s gonna hurt Mom.”

He sees Rafe avert his eyes. _I never told you about this_ , he thinks. _We didn’t tell each other a lot of things, really._

“Why don’t’cha play while I get those pancakes, huh? You can borrow my truck.” He reaches out for the truck by Rafe’s knee, and Rafe wordlessly passes it to him. “Here, see?” He presses it into Nathan’s clumsy fingers. “I’ll be right back.”

He hears the shouting now, muffled and distant even though he knows they’re just through the open doorway.

Rafe stands up after him.

“My friend got angry after I took the truck from him and gave it to Nathan,” Sam whispers to him, afraid his parents might hear him even after all this time. “He ran out. He never came over again after that.” He chuckles. “Kept the sweater, though.”

“What an asshole,” Rafe says. He slides his fingers between Sam’s. 

“He was a kid.”

“Kids can be assholes.”

Sam hums. They’re just two steps from the doorway now, and everything beyond that is blurry: A smear of counters along the wall, a bowl of colorful shapes on the counter, two fuzzy figures holding tense positions by the kitchen island. There’s a single clear detail: A plate of strawberry pancakes on the breakfast table. Funny that he can’t remember much what his mother and father looked like, but he can remember that there were three slices of strawberries and one of them was about to slide off of the topmost pancake.

“We don’t have to be here,” Rafe says with a gentleness that Sam had forgotten he was capable of.

“It’s okay." It's already happened, hasn't it? "I just...don't talk about this."

“Why not?”

_Shouting, a fist slamming down on the counter, silverware rattling._ He likes telling Nathan about this, about the first time Mom made them strawberry pancakes and Nathan ate so many that he got sick, but he never gets around to telling the second half.

“I think my reasoning was, if I don’t talk about it, I’ll forget about it. And if I forget about it, it’s as if it never happened.” 

He sees Rafe smile without much humor. “That’s not how it works though, is it?”

“No, it’s not.” He watches the shapes of his parents move. He remembers being in this exact position years ago, rooted in place, alone and terrified but even more terrified of showing it. “I wish I had you as a friend when I was younger.”

“No, you don’t.” Rafe’s smile takes on a self-deprecating tilt. “I was an example of how kids can be assholes.”

“You would’ve stayed with me, though.” Sam squeezes his hand.

“Yeah.” Rafe sighs, leans his head against Sam’s arm. “I would have.”

_Why didn’t you?_

“Hey,” he says, willing himself to look away finally, “come with me. _I_ wanna show you something this time.”

He glances back once as they walk to the front door, maybe hoping that the figures will sharpen and he might remember what his mother looks like, but they’ve disappeared entirely by the time he and Rafe reach the door. Nathan too is gone, and the toy truck lays on its side on the carpet.

_ No. Please not yet. _

He leads Rafe around the house, past the small garden that their mother kept, and into the back. “I’ve always wanted to take you back here,” he admits when they reach the edge of the frozen pond. This was a cold day, he remembers, but he doesn’t feel it at the moment.

Rafe is the one who takes an experimental step forward, and Sam holds onto him protectively as he tests his balance over frozen water. “So,” Rafe says, face tight in concentration as he gets tries to move his feet, “do you ever teach me how to skate?”

“No.”

“Wow.” Rafe finally looks back up at him in mock hurt. “You let me make a fool of myself on our rink?”

“No, I mean.” Sam shakes his head, stepping onto the ice after Rafe. They glide a few inches, then slow to a stop. “We never even got to use the rink before we…you know.”

“That’s too bad,” Rafe says. "Help me get to the middle."

They don't quite make it— Sam’s not sure who slips first, but whoever it is brings the other down with them, and the world blurs past in blacks and whites as he loses his balance. He thinks he sees stars when he lands hard on his back, and he doesn't have time to catch his breath before Rafe's weight lands on top of him. 

Rafe groans, burying his face into Sam’s collar. “ _That’s_ why you should teach me.”

Sam cradles the back of Rafe’s head, pushing away the snowflakes melting in his hair. It’s a nice thought: him and Rafe, stumbling along the railing, Rafe’s gloved hand held tight in his. “When this is done,” he says, “I won’t remember you, and you still won’t remember me.”

The truth of it settles.

“But it’s not done yet.” Rafe pushes himself up on two hands to look down properly at Sam. “I love you."

Sam feels his chest hitch. "You'll ch—"

"No, let me finish. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking when I decided to erase you, but I love you right now.”

“That’s the problem, Rafe,” Sam says gently. “That’s right now. It’s going to change. It _does_ change.” _We’ll both change._ “We’ll fight, and we’ll stop wanting to make up. You’ll leave, and I won’t stop you. You won’t come back, and I won’t go looking for you.”

“ _Why?_ ” Rafe demands. “Why do we change? _When_? What happens that makes up stop…stop _trying_?”

“I don’t know.” Sam closes his eyes, partly because he’s tired of running, partly because he can’t look Rafe in the eye as he admits, “We just do.”

He’s lying alone on top of a frozen pond, looking at stars that aren’t there anymore.

“I’m sorry,” he says to no one. “For what it’s worth now, I’m sorry.”

The trees disappear. The snow disappears. The ice disappears and there’s no water for him to fall into.

He disappears.

 

 

(“Should we have let him go?” Flynn asks in the middle of his fourth lap around the wall. “Was that the right thing to do?”

Chloe feels her eye twitch but she bites back a snide comment—lashing out at Flynn won’t do them any good. “Can you sit down, please? You’re making _me_ dizzy.”

“Should— We’ll have to tell Rafe, won’t we? _Christ_ , the Adlers are one of our biggest investors, if this gets out—”

“ _Flynn._ ” She stands up, yanks the chair out, and gestures for him to sit. “Sit here and make sure the erasure keeps going.”

“What?” Flynn stares at her, incredulous. “We’re going to keep going?”

“There’s no other way. We don’t need to risk him trying to make contact with Rafe when he hears about this. Besides, half of his memory has already been obliterated, and Rafe has none of him at all—”

“Okay, okay, I get it.” Flynn thankfully does as he’s told and sits in front of the computer _._ “Wait, _when_ he hears about this?” He looks at her as if she’s grown three heads. “We’re going to call Fausse out?”

And Chloe has to remind herself that Flynn wasn’t there when Rafe Adler first walked into the waiting room with his mother. Flynn wasn’t the one whom Wilfreda Adler pulled aside and pleaded with weary eyes, _Please help my son be happy again._ Rafe Adler was younger than most people who came in here, younger than her, and he had taken a week of coming-and-going, leaving two forms partway finished before finally completing one. He had broken down in silent tears when he first sat in the chair and Chloe brought out a black velvet box in front of him. 

_This won’t make you happy_ , she had said honestly before she administered the anesthesia,  _but it might bring you peace._

_That will have to be good enough,_ Rafe Adler had murmured. He had looked at her, and she had felt a swell of pity for this case in particular. _Thank you._ And he had offered his arm out to her.

“Yes,” she tells Flynn with a sigh, “we are going to make sure that Fausse gets what he deserves for this. And we _will_ tell the Adlers. Rafe, especially.” _I will have to_ , she really means. That’s the least she can do for them. _I should have known. I should have seen the way that bastard looked at him—_

She looks at the other man in that room with them—Samuel Drake, she reminds herself. She's heard a few things about him from Nathan, but this has been their first formal meeting. _I’m sorry it couldn’t have gone better._

“I’m going to start making some phone calls. You— You sit here and _pay attention_ , you understand?”

“All right, yeah, I’ve got it,” Flynn says, except Chloe makes it halfway across the room before he pipes up, “Uh, Chloe, is this supposed to be happening?” 

She’s at his side in an instant, thinking _no no no this can’t go wrong too_. “What— Where is he? Did you skip a memory?”

“I didn’t do anything! It was like that when I sat down!”

_I haven’t been paying as much attention since Fau— Shit._ “Come on, come on,” she mutters, wrestling the mouse from Flynn and using it to flick from one image to another. Each one remains bare, no telltale colors to indicate where Samuel Drake has gone. “Where are you, how did you get— Ah, there you are.”

“That’s…” Flynn squints at the screen as he types the right command to force Sam back on the right memories. “…really far off the map. What was he doing there?”

“I don’t know.” Chloe drags a hand down her face, too stressed now to literally try and read their client’s mind. “I don’t know, just. If it happens again, look for his base colors and put him back on track. There are only a couple left.”

She’s surprised when Flynn takes her hand and squeezes it. “I’ve got it. It’s going to be okay.”

It probably isn’t, but she appreciates the thought and tries to smile in return. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”)

 

 

“I guess we can’t really run from it,” Sam says, stepping over a pile of fallen books.

Rafe has no response for that, and together they stand and inspect the apartment like tourists to their own home. “Where are we now?” 

The apartment is easily recognizable, but Sam knows that isn’t what Rafe means. The books on the shelf are still packed loose, and there are only two clocks on the wall. His pillows are still stacked on one side of the bed. Sometime early, then. Closer to the start. “One of our first fights, I think.”

“About you forgetting the reservation?”

“No, I think this was about the books.” He had a habit of reading and then putting down books on the nearest surface. It always grated on Rafe’s nerves, even back when he was barely staying in the apartment. 

He picks one up from the floor. The cover is a little fuzzy, but he can make out the title _The Alchemist_.

“Oh, I remember,” Rafe says, pausing short of the front door. It’s ajar. “I stormed out.”

“You did that a lot.”

“I do.” Rafe smiles. “Do you remember what you said?”

“I told you that you were overreacting.”

“You were probably right.”

“Then you called me a goddamn mess.”

“And?”

“You were right.”

Sam steps takes a step forward, reaching for him. Rafe opens himself to him, letting Sam wrap his arms around his waist and hold him flush against his body. “Neither of us apologized,” he says into Rafe’s hair, closing his eyes. “You came back, and I hugged you, and you let me, and after that we were okay again.”

It was all silent, he remembers, both of them too proud to say it but hoping that if they pressed into each other hard enough, it would make up for it.

“I wish I’d apologized, though,” Rafe says against his chest.

“Yeah. Me too.”

“Sam?”

“Hm?”

“Why don’t we work out?”

“I think we both wanted the same thing,” he says, mulling over each word before he says it out loud, “but we wanted to get there in different ways.”

“And that was why we didn’t work out?”

There’s more to it, he knows, but at the heart of everything—isn’t that the answer? “I guess so.”

Rafe looks up at him. “Do you still love me?”

“I do.”

It’s an answer and it’s a paradox—if he can look at Rafe now and think, _I love you, I wish things had gone differently, I wish you still loved me,_ and mean every single one of them, maybe he was never out of love in the first place. But if he was never out of love, how could he say the things he’s said? Why is he here, right now, choosing the same thing Rafe did—to forget?

“And there’s nothing else you can do?” Rafe whispers. He was always doing that, expecting more than Sam was ready to give him. Or maybe it was the other way around—Sam was never giving Rafe what he deserved. Maybe it was both.

Over Rafe’s shoulder, he sees the books wink out of existence. The clocks disappear. The door is closed

 

 

and nudging open as Rafe walks in with a sizable box in his arms, filled to the brim with things that will soon become just as part of the apartment. As _he_ will be.

“Your security guard is a nice woman,” he says as he drops off his copy of the keys on the counter. Sam instinctively moves to help him hold up the box, and their hands brush where they both support the bottom. _Be careful,_ he thinks _, there’s a hole on the bottom of this thing._ “She—”

Rafe stops, gaze fixed on an empty spot on the bookshelf. “I can’t believe you got me to move in,” he says.

Sam cracks a smile and takes out the clock from the box. He places it on the empty spot for now; later it will be hung on the wall behind the television, where they can easily see it from the bed. “I can’t believe it either.”

“You made me want to a lot of things with you.”

“And all of them could go wrong in a lot of ways?”

Rafe chuckles. “That’s why I had so many back up plans. I was afraid we wouldn’t have time to do everything. It terrified me, how much I wanted to do with you—have I ever told you that? _You_ terrified me.” His gaze averts downwards to the rest of the things in the box, and Sam’s follows. He doesn’t see it, but he knows that somewhere in there is an atlas, just beginning to be marked, and he mourns all the places they _had etched into their futures with red ink, as if to signify their urgency._

_“Scotland,” Rafe announced, draping himself unceremoniously over Sam’s legs wearing nothing but the bedsheets. “Let’s get our own house in Scotland.”_

_Sam raised an eyebrow, moving his cigarette so he didn’t get ash in Rafe’s hair. “Why Scotland?”_

_“I heard we have a shared interest in castles.”_

_“You gonna buy me a castle?”_

_“Do you_ want _one?”_

_“Hey, if you’re offering— It’s going to be cold, though. You hate the cold.”_

_“So? Maybe we’ll have our own frozen pond and you can finally teach me how to skate.”_

_“Why don’t we_ visit _Scotland first,” he suggested. He knew it was impossible to get Rafe off an idea once he was latched onto it, but Scotland didn’t sound so bad. He grinned. “See if you could really stand living with me_ and _the cold.”_

_Rafe grinned back. “That would be a good start.”_

“Oh, come on,” he teases lightly. “Me? How could _I_ have possibly terrified you?”

“I could never tell if we wanted the same things,” Rafe says with a small shrug. “I was afraid of moving too fast. I had no idea what I was doing, really.” He looks at Sam with a diffident smile. They stand together, empty-handed. “You were the first person I wanted anything and everything to do with.”

_You were._ He was. 

Past tense, finally.

“I guess it doesn’t matter now, does it?”

He doesn’t need to look down to know that there is smoke curling around their feet. “No. I guess not.”

 

 

A final memory: A courtyard, a warm night in March.

This transition is a gentle one. He can tell they don’t have much time left; there’s darkness in the edges of his vision, waiting.

“I barely remember this,” Rafe admits. He toes a pebble from the sidewalk, and Sam watches it bounce and skitter to a stop next to the tire of his motorcycle. “I remember our proper meeting better.”

“Maybe you had too much to drink this night,” Sam says wryly, coming up next to him.

They observe the fountain in silence.

“What made us change?” Rafe asks. “I remember fighting, but I remember always making up. I remember you…you said you were happy, and I was too.” He blinks, turns to Sam. “When do we change?”

When? “There wasn’t one time. It happened slowly, the kind of thing you don’t realize is happening until it’s done or it’s too late, you know?”

“But there must have been something that set it off. Was it— Was it the rink?”

“No—”

“So what _was_ it?”

_“Is this okay?” Rafe was still smiling but there was now uncertainty in his face, and Sam shook his head quickly, trying to dispel it._

_“No, no— I mean, yes, it’s okay. It’s more than okay, Rafe.” He laughed, bringing Rafe into a crushing hug. “I love it. Thank you. I love you.” And in case Rafe had any other doubts, he kissed him once, twice, however many times it took for Rafe to finally laugh against his mouth too, happy._

_He was the one who pulled away first, leaning their foreheads together and watching Rafe’s eyes open slowly, the way they did early in the morning. He felt Rafe’s hand ghost over his cheek, affectionate, just seconds before he whispered, almost so quietly that Sam couldn’t hear it, “Marry me?”_

Sam sighs. “You asked me to marry you.”

He sees Rafe’s eyes widen in surprise.

“I didn’t say yes.”

_“Rafe, I—”_

“I mean, I didn’t say no either, but I think you just heard that it wasn’t a yes.” 

_“I love you, but—”_

_Rafe’s expression shuttering._

“I wanted to explain, but…you didn’t want to talk about it.”

_“Maybe— I don’t know if we’re ready, it’s a little— Don’t you think it’s a little fast?”_

“You kept saying it was fine. We… We tried to move past it, both of us, but it was— It was awful, you know? Afterward, we were both trying too hard to pretend it never happened. You were more distant, and I was angry because I thought _you_ were angry, and I thought you were being selfish. So I started ignoring you too, but that just made things worse, and... And then one day I forgot to make a reservation for somewhere we'd picked for dinner, and you got so angry that you walked out in the middle of a snowstorm. You didn't come back until hours later, and by then I was furious too. We fought again, and you left again, and—”

“I didn’t come back.”

“—I didn’t go after you.”

“Were you happy that you didn’t?” Rafe suddenly turns on him, sounding angry, but Sam thinks there’s something else there too—a desperation, a _please say no._

He laughs, a brief bubble of sound that just as quickly dies out when he realizes this isn't something he can try to lighten. “No,” he says, shaking his head urgently, “ _God_ , no, I’ve regretted it ever since.” He reaches out for Rafe, but Rafe shakes his head, takes a step back, and Sam thinks, _No, please, I don’t want this._

“So why are you letting this happen?” Rafe accuses, swiping the back of his hand across his eyes. “What happened to trying to stop this? You’re going to let someone else use _our_ memories and— You’re just going to let me go—”

“Because you’re already gone! I’ve _already_ lost you, Rafe, what do you want me to do?” The fountain is gone. “Christ, I— I don’t want to fight, _please_ let’s not fight, not now.”

_Please, make it stop._

“No.” Rafe shakes his head almost vehemently, raising a hand between them. “No, no, you don’t get to say that. That’s always how you want things—easy. It doesn’t work like that. _We_ don’t work like that. Sometimes you _have_ to fight.”

“But what the hell is it going to do for us here, Rafe? Come on.” He closes the distance between them and takes Rafe’s hand, a final attempt to pull him back, make him stay. “This is going to be over soon, we both know it. I don’t want our last memory to be of us fighting. Please?”

Rafe _looks_ at him. “That’s not the kind of fighting I’m talking about, Sam,” he says softly, “and I think you know that.”

He leans in and whispers his last words into Sam’s cheek.

“I will,” Sam promises.

And he’s gone.

 

 

When did it get so dark?

 

 

“I don’t want this,” he says. “I don’t want this.”

He fists his hair in his hands, screws his eyes shut. There's nothing left of the courtyard, and he's standing alone in an endless sea of black. 

“I don’t want this.”

 

 

_He leaned in until his lips brushed against Rafe’s bare shoulder and there, he whispered a question: “Why did you want to marry me?”_

_“Do you want to hear something absolutely crazy?” Rafe asked instead, as if about to impart some great secret to him._

_“Go for it.”_

_“I still want to.”_

 

 

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, God, I wish I could take it back. I wish I could take it back. I don’t want to forget. I still l—”

 

 

 

 

** —FEBRUARY FIFTEENTH. **

In bed, blinking sunlight away, buried under too many sheets and pillows for one person: This is how he wakes. Slowly, carefully, with the weight of a forgotten word on his tongue, Sam sits up, and the world returns to him.

His head hurts. The calendar tells him that it is one day after Valentine’s Day, and the clocks (he can’t remember what ever drove him to buy six) tell him that it is nearing ten in the morning.

He hears the sounds of somebody else’s snoring—he frowns, unable to remember the last time he invited anyone over. He bumps into the drawer on his way to the living room.

There’s a man sleeping on his couch.

Sam sighs, running a hand through his hair. “Ah, Sully,” he mutters, relief washing through him. He’d thought someone had broken in. 

He moves back to the bed, where he’d knocked some books over. He picks them up and starts to put them back on the drawer, but then they look messy there, so he opens the drawer and tries to shove them in. _Out of sight, out of mind_ , he's thinking. He can just as well put them back on the shelf, but it seems too great a distance for his growing headache.

The books don’t quite fit though. He has to pull out a little box and rearrange some things before the drawer finally slides shut, and then as  he’s putting the box down he realizes he’s never seen it before. There’s something inside, a little object wrapped in a soft black cloth that turns out to be a glass etching of a castle.

“Huh,” he says thoughtfully, placing it next to his lamp. He doesn’t think there's anything too extraordinary about castles, but it makes for nice decoration.

 

 

Nathan hugs him when he walks through the door, and it’s a proper, two-armed hug, like Nathan hasn’t seen him for weeks.

“He had a rough night,” Sully warns, stepping in after him and scooping an excited Cassie into his arms.

“Yeah, I heard you, uh, got pretty hammered last night,” Nate says with a chuckle, finally releasing him and stepping back. His gaze lingers on Sam's face, likely at the bruise Sam woke up with that morning, but he doesn't ask, and Sam's glad that he doesn't have to explain.

“I’m sure whatever Sully told you was ten times worse than it actually was,” he says with a fond roll of his eyes, crouching down to answer Vicky’s excited yips. “Hey, girl. You miss me?”

“Uncle Sam?” Cassie calls from Sully’s arms. “Where’s—”

“Hey, Cassie," Nate says, "come help me set the table.”

Cassie’s eyes light up at the idea of doing something _grown up_ , and she wiggles out of Sully’s arms to run first into the dining room. “We made strawberry pancakes!” she throws over her shoulder, giggling.

“I have no idea who she gets that energy from,” Sam remarks as he takes off his jacket.

“Nathan, I think,” Elena says. She’s making her way down the stairs, looking a little worse-for-wear but smiling nonetheless.

“Oh, hey,” Sam says, pulling her into a hug too. He doesn't fail to notice the subtle redness to her eyes. “Everything okay? Did my brother do something stupid?”

She chuckles. “No, not him,” she says, sounding a little sad, and Sam wants to ask but she's shaking her head and tugging him away from the stairs. “Come on,” she says, “Nate made pancakes when he heard you were coming.”

He lets himself be herded into the kitchen. If for some reason he glances back at the door, he doesn’t think much about it.

 

 

 

 

** —MARCH FOURTEENTH. **

“One clock wasn’t enough?” is Rafe’s first observation inside the apartment.

Sam chuckles as he shuts the door behind them and kicks off his shoes. “Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking either. You want milk or cream with your coffee?” He walks past Rafe and into the kitchen, their shoulders brushing along the way. It's the kind of casual contact that he hasn't had in a while. It feels nice.

“Either is fine.”

He starts the coffee maker before moving back to the closet by the door and shedding his winter wear systematically: His hat, his scarf, his gloves, his jacket. “You can come in, you know,” he says, amused when he sees that Rafe hasn’t moved very far inside. “I did invite you in.”

“Which makes me question your judgment," Rafe says, blinking out of his reverie.

“What, you mean you don’t invite random strangers inside for coffee?” Sam says lightly. “Here, let me take your jacket.”

“Oh, no.” Rafe draws his arms over his middle, as if protecting his jacket. “I think I’ll keep it on.” He seems considerably less confident than he was before Sam invited him inside, and Sam wonders what he’s thinking.

“Not planning to stay long, then?” he tries, but Rafe now seems to be busy inspecting his bookshelf, the stereo and his books and the etching on display. Sam joins him there, stepping over the wet trail their snow-trodden shoes have left on the floor. He’ll have to clean that up later, but for now he doesn’t mind; the two sets of footprints make his apartment look a little less lonely.

_God, how desperate are you for company?_

“This is nice,” Rafe says, tracing a finger over front of the glass. “Did you get it from that new glassware shop?”

Sam doesn’t really know what he's talking about, but he says “Yeah” anyway because it sounds like the right answer.

“I’ve been meaning to check it out."

“You could have gone today. Instead of, you know,” he gestures to the melting snowflakes in Rafe’s hair, “standing out there, almost freezing.”

“I was looking for someone.”

“Did you find them?”

“I don’t know.” Rafe’s hand pauses at the edge of the shelf, and Sam's about to tell him that he can grab a book if he wants, but then he's suddenly saying, "About a month ago, I met you there." It takes Sam some time to realize he's talking about the rink. “You punched my— ex. Do you remember?”

“What?” Sam laughs a little and waits for the rest of the joke, but Rafe looks completely serious. “I, uh— No, I can’t say I remember punching anyone recently. I think you might have me confused with someone else.” Another laugh dies in his throat as he considers that possibility—so Rafe only agreed to see him because he thought he was someone else. Sam tries not to feel disappointed.

“...Yes. You're probably right.” A series of emotions flicker over Rafe’s face too quickly for Sam to read. Rafe steps away from him. “I’m sorry. Fuck. This was stupid, I’m going to—”

He seems unable to decide whether to leave or not, and Sam's close to putting his hands on his shoulders and making the decision for him, but Rafe grabs for him first. “This— I think this is yours,” he says, forcing something metal and small into Sam’s palm and forcibly closing his fingers over it. “I’m sorry for— I’m sorry.”

“Rafe—” But Rafe is already slipping out of the door, ignoring Sam's calls after him. “Wait, you never even had—” 

Sam breaks off into a sigh when he sees Rafe disappear around the corner and he hears the doors to the stairwell opening, then shutting. “Your coffee,” he finishes to his empty floor. “Ah, shit.” 

He goes back inside his apartment. “More for me,” he mumbles in an attempt to shake off the odd incident. It’s times like this that he wishes he had a cat or a dog, something or someone he could turn to instead of just talking to himself.

He’s checking on the coffee when he realizes he still has his fist clenched over the item that Rafe had been so desperate to give him, and he curiously unfolds his fingers to reveal a small brass key.

 

 

A manila envelope, bent and wrinkled in a way that suggests the sender had to fight to cram it into his overflowing mailbox. Inside: a stapled packet of papers bearing handwriting that looks too much like his. A note: _Sam Drake— You deserve to have this, at least. There’s more, if you decide you want more. I’m sorry for the mess._ An unfamiliar address.

_What’s with everyone apologizing lately?_

A recorder carrying his voice, a little grainy and completely alien but undeniably his: _“My name is Samuel Drake. I’m here to erase R… Rafe Adler because he’s moved on, and I want to move on too…”_

 

 

 

 

** —MARCH FIFTEENTH. **

Rafe finds his way back to the apartment without really trying. He thinks he could do it with his eyes closed if he had to, like a muscle memory that isn’t so easily erased.

The security guard smiles at him when she sees him. “I’m glad you and Mr. Drake are seeing each other again,” she tells him, and there it is again, hearing someone talk about a piece of his past that he has yet to recover, but she means it well and she reminds him of his mother so he smiles back at her and heads for the stairwell.

Sam doesn’t open the door when he knocks once, twice. Rafe doesn’t expect him to, so he stands there in front of the door and swallows his pride and says, “You don’t remember it, but you punched my ex in the park. I punched you back because I wasn't his ex then, and I felt like that was the reaction I was supposed to have. Two days later, he asked me if I wanted to go to Scotland with him, and I punched him twice as hard.”

He closes his eyes and tells himself _keep talking you have to keep talking_ because if he doesn’t say this now then he’s afraid he never will.

“Scotland’s on the list of things that don’t make any sense to me. Madagascar, Singapore, Brazil, and a handful of other countries are on it too. So is that ice rink outside—it’s apparently mine, did you know that? I’m still getting letters from people I don’t know thanking me for funding the park’s restoration, which doesn’t make sense because I remember everything I spend money on and I. I don’t remember that at all.

“I don’t remember a lot of things, apparently. Did you hear about the scandal around that company, Lacuna? Maybe not—my parents paid well to keep people’s mouths shut.” A laugh. “Turns out I was going through some sort of break up and I went to Lacuna to have the guy erased from my memory. It’s problem solved for a few days, until someone else comes along, and he happens to know what I put in my coffee, the opera house I visit once a month, and all the places I want to travel someday. My parents, they— They call it perfect, they see he treats me well, but then he mentions Scotland one day, and— I don’t know, I get angry. I feel like he’s _taking_ something from me, and I punch him. He gets angry too, and then we’re fighting, and he says something like _Jesus, what did he see in you?_ and I don’t really think about it because I’m busy kicking him out of my goddamn apartment.

“The next day, my parents are at my doorstep with some woman I’ve never seen before, and my mother is crying and apologizing. I don’t know why. They tell me that I had someone wiped from my memory and that my new _boyfriend_ had gotten his hands on my files somehow, and that he was using them to make me love him—God, that sounds so trite.”

He leans his forehead against the wood of the door and finds that he’s terrified—terrified that Samuel Drake might be on the other side and terrified that he might not be.

“So I’m angry. I’m more angry than upset, because nothing with him _felt_ right anyway, so good riddance, I don’t have to apologize about punching him. The woman that came with my parents—she keeps apologizing too, and she leaves me with a recording of an interview I apparently did for the erasure, and then I get to listen to my own voice saying I have decided to erase Samuel Drake because I’m afraid I care about him too much, and that’s— that’s why I don’t understand why people kept apologizing to me, when according to the forms and the recordings, it was my own damn choice in the first place. My own _stupid_ choice.

“The woman — her name was Chloe — she said I had left some things in their building and I was welcome to come by and get them any time I want, as if— as if the papers and the recordings, the pictures of my fucking _brain_ , weren’t overwhelming enough, you know?”

This part is hard to confess, but he can't deny that he feels lighter with each word that leaves him. It's exhilarating, and he wants to feel more.

“I went to pick up my things because I wanted to know, maybe remember who you were, I mean. I wanted to know who you were, what kind of person you had to be to see _something_ in me. There— There were so many postcards. They were addressed to a, um, a Nathan Drake, sometimes an Elena, and they all had two different writing styles on them. I could tell which one was mine — and even then I wasn’t sure if it was _mine_ because those messages sounded so happy — and the other one I figured was— was you.

“There were printouts of articles on pirates too. Sir Francis Drake, he was in there a lot, and there were highlighter marks and notes all over these papers, all in my handwriting, like I’d spent hours looking over them. I’ve never been interested in that sort of history, but apparently I once was interested enough to restore an ice rink and name it after his ship. It must have something to do with you. Why else would I have wanted to forget that?

“There were other little things—souvenirs from countries I don’t remember visiting. Ticket stubs, always in pairs, to movies and shows I don’t remember seeing. I realize they’re all things I want to do, but whether that’s because I’ve always wanted to do them or because I liked doing them with _you,_ I don’t know. And then, then—”

_Click._ He yanks himself away from the door when he hears the sound of a lock, feeling a spike of _terror_ —

—but it’s just Samuel Drake standing in the doorway, and it’s the sight of him on the verge of tears that pushes _Rafe_ over the edge and the rest is tumbling out: “At the end of it, there was a box, a little black box, and there was a _ring_ in it, and it— it _must_ have been for you, because why else would it be in there? Why else would it be in there? Oh, _fuck_ —”

And then Sam’s arms are around him, tight and anchoring and holding him through the tremors, and it feels _good_ but then he has to struggle to say, “I’m sorry. Sam. I’m sorry. I know you don’t remember, I know you erased me too, but for what it’s worth, for everything, I’m so sorry—”

“It’s okay,” Sam’s whispering urgently against his temple, “Rafe, it’s okay. Do you— Can you come in? Please?”

Rafe hates the thought of baring his face and being seen _crying_ , but Sam’s hands are gentle on him, coaxing, and finally he manages to nod and step into the apartment. Immediately, he hears the sound of Sam’s voice floating through the room: _“…evening, around seven, and it was warm for March, I remember that. He was attending a dinner event at a hotel, and I happened to be passing by while he was going out for fresh air…”_

His vision blurs again when he sees the assortment of items on the floor, and at first glance a haphazard mess, but on closer inspection he realizes there’s a reverence in the way they’ve been placed: A snow globe by the foot of the couch, a small carving of a bird. A pile of cassettes. A pair of tickets to the opera house, a matching set of hospital bracelets bearing each of their names. An atlas with a fraying cover, a postcard with a picture of Iguasu Falls. 

“I went to Lacuna this morning,” Sam says behind him. The recording clicks off. “I got my stuff too. There’s— Ah, shit, there’s still more I have to go through.” He gestures weakly to a box off to the side, where Rafe can still see an assortment of other things. “So if you’re here for answers, I… I don’t have much figured out yet.”

Rafe nods mutely. “I’ll be honest,” he mutters, “even if you look through everything, you might not figure much out. Might just end up—

Sam glances at him. “Crying a lot?” he offers with a grim smile, tipping his head in Rafe’s direction, and Rafe gives a short laugh and wipes at his own face.

“Yeah.”

“I can see that.”

“It’s been hell,” Rafe admits. 

“Yeah.” Sam passes him a grim little smile. “I know.”

Silence falls, and Sam’s faraway gaze moves back to the items on the floor. Rafe watches him, really looks at him for the first time: dark hair smoothed back loosely, smile lines around his eyes, fingers twitching occasionally as if they’re used to holding something. He tries to imagine himself with someone like Sam, tries to imagine the two of them sitting in a restaurant or going to a show or just walking together, hand-in-hand.

He can’t. But he can’t imagine _not_ doing those things either.

“You can look through what I have, if it’ll help you figure things out on your end,” Sam says, breaking the silence. “I figure it’s the least I can do. But if there’s nothing else you need, I— I was hoping to look through these alone, if that’s okay with you.”

Rafe shakes his head quickly. “No, no, I can come back whenever you’re done. You don’t have to— You don’t owe me anything.”

“I did something to you that made you want to forget me—”

“I must have done some shitty things to make you want to forget me too.”

“So if we both wanted to forget, why are we here? How did we still find each other?” Sam lifts his hands loosely, a helpless sort of gesture. “I’ve been going to that rink every day since I apparently had you erased from my memories. Why did I keep doing that?”

“I don’t know,” he answers, honest. “But I’m glad you did. I’m glad I found you.”

He sees Sam’s jaw tighten, and his heart sinks— _you’re so selfish_ , he tells himself, _you come here, never once considering that_ he _might want to move on from you._

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound… I’m not asking anything from you. Yesterday, I didn’t know it was _you_ until you told me your name, and the only reason I let you invite me in anyway is because I’m selfish, and I keep thinking there must be a reason that we met again, even after we both wanted to forget. There’s— There’s this saying that goes, when you want something, all the universe—”

“—all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it. I know,” Sam finishes for him. He grabs a book from the shelf nearby and offers it to Rafe. “I think this is yours.”

Rafe accepts the book, smoothing his thumb over the familiar title, _The Alchemist._ He looks at Sam, a little afraid that he’ll be met with coldness, but Sam is only looking back at him. “I was just thinking,” he continues, voice growing smaller by the second, “the universe sure as hell isn’t helping us forget, so maybe— Maybe that’s not what either of us really wanted.”

“What do _you_ want, then?”

“I want you in my life.” He pauses to give Sam a chance to say no, to kick him out, and when Sam doesn’t, he goes on, “I don’t care if it’s as a friend, or like before, or just—someone I can call whenever I panic and remember that I’m missing a year of my life, I just want to know you again.” He stops himself before he ends up demanding too much. “What about you? What do you want?”

“I don’t know what I want yet.”

_Don’t you dare feel disappointed. Don’t you dare._ He forces himself to nod. “I understand.”

“I think I need to look through my things alone first. And then I’d like to see what you have, to understand what happened on both sides.” Sam hazards a glance at him. “If that’s okay.”

“Yeah. Yes, of course it’s okay. I’ve looked through my things enough to have them memorized—you can have them for as long as you need them.”

“Thank you.”

“I can bring them tomorr—”

“I probably won’t need them until—”

“Oh, shit.” Rafe clamps his mouth shut. Opens it again. “Anytime. I can bring them over anytime you want.”

He looks at Sam, Sam looks at him, and—

Sam laughs. It’s a clear, genuine sound, and it floods Rafe with such relief that he doesn’t really think twice about laughing with him _._

“Tomorrow sounds good, if you can,” Sam tells him when their laughter dies down, smiling in a way that makes Rafe’s stomach flutter. “Maybe we’ll figure out more together—it’ll be good to have everything together and both of us there to fill in our sides of the story.”

“You want me there?”

“ ‘Course, I— I don’t know what I want out of… _us_ , but it makes sense to have you there, when it’s our memories I’m trying to make sense of, you know?” Sam smiles at him, and Rafe thinks, _Oh._ “It would also be nice if you stuck around long enough to actually drink your coffee too. If it’s not too much to ask.””

“It isn’t.”

“Good.” He sees Sam take something else from the shelf. “Come here.” Rafe furtively steps forward, and Sam meets him halfway, uncapping a red pen and turning Rafe’s hand palm-up. “This is me.” Rafe watches him scrawl a ten-digit number into his skin. “In case that panic happens tonight.”

The red is glaringly bright against his skin, and he makes sure he doesn’t close his fist and accidentally smear it as he withdraws his hand. “Thank you.” He takes a deep breath, then releases it. His cheeks feel stiff from the tears that have dried there and he has a feeling that his eyes will be sore come morning, but that seems like a small price to pay for a second chance. “I’m going to let you do the, um, the alone part now,” he says. “But I won’t forget about tomorrow.”

It might be fondness that he sees in Sam’s gaze. “I’ll be here.”

He thinks as he leaves, _I see how I might have fallen in love with you._

 

 

He sends Sam a message on his way down the stairs, a simple _this is me_ to make sure Sam has his number too. He's not expecting much else; he wasn't expecting to walk out of this with anything at all. He certainly doesn’t expect Sam to call when he reaches the lobby.

“I meant to ask you,” Sam says when he picks up, sounding a little out of breath, and Rafe entertains the idea that he tried to run after him. “You had my mailbox key. I was— I was wondering if you had any other keys, by any chance.”

Rafe’s eyes widen when he remembers the very reason that he came to see Sam in the first place. “I do,” he says, relieved when he reaches into his pocket and feels the shape of a key there. “I'm pretty sure it's a copy of your apartment key. I can leave it with your security—”

“No,” Sam says quickly, and Rafe stops before he walks out of the front doors. 

Outside, the snow has stopped falling, and he can see the shape of the rink across the street. 

“I want you to keep it," Sam continues. "For— For when you come back.”

_ When? _

“Okay,” Rafe says, hand tightening over the door handle. "If you're sure."

"I'm sure."

“Sam?”

“Hm?”

He steels himself, keeping his eyes fixed ahead. He's not sure where this comes from, but, like everything else he confessed to that door, he feels like if he doesn't say it now he'll regret it later: “About tomorrow. About—any other time I'm with you. I can’t promise that I won't start any arguments. I can’t promise that I won't lose my temper or get impatient or say something stupid. I can’t promise I won’t walk out again. I’m going to try, but I— I can’t promise.” Sam should know that. He deserves to know that.

There's a beat of silence, and then Sam says, quietly but certainly: “All the more reason for you to keep a key, then.”

 

 

 

_He leaned in. "Find me." These were his last words, murmured against Sam's cheek where Sam heard every syllable and tried to commit each one to heart. “Remember me, Sam. Find me, and if you want, we can start over.”_

_And he was already disappearing but that didn’t stop Sam from promising, “I will.”_

 

 

 

He has.

**Author's Note:**

> "And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it," comes from Paul Coelho's _The Alchemist._ since its publication, he has [further explained](http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2015/03/06/todays-question-by-marc/), "Mind you, some people don’t truly want something or sometimes want things that in the end won’t truly help them. The Universe is a merely and echo of our desires, may they be constructive or destructive ones."


End file.
